


Doctor Who and the Hive of the Daleks

by mary_pseud



Series: Damnatio Memoriae [18]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alien Invasion, Don't copy to other sites, F/M, Mind Transfer, Post-Serial: s078 Genesis of the Daleks, Skaro, Torture, alternative universe, canon-typical genocidal musings, divine possession, environmental contamination, sexual content in chapter 7, thousand years war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 23
Words: 74,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22191001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/mary_pseud
Summary: On Skaro, the Fourth Doctor and Leela are accused of trying to assassinate Davros.  Can they clear their names and rescue K9, who has been captured by the Daleks?
Relationships: Davros & Nyder (Doctor Who), Fourth Doctor & Leela
Series: Damnatio Memoriae [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/91891
Kudos: 2





	1. Cross the Same River

It was a rippling field of white, like an ocean of milk that had somehow congealed. It stretched in irregular billows and hollows as far as the eye could see, and the blue sky overhead seemed almost an afterthought. Huddled against a hill of the white stuff, two figures draped in glittery black robes talked to each other in hushed, urgent tones.

"You must be there," said one figure. "The God could come among us, any time!" The surface behind them bulged outwards, and they leaned aside without even realising they had moved, as though it was nothing of importance that a hill seemed ready to ooze over them.

"But it's dangerous, even now. The Daughters are always watching-"

"If the God comes, they will be gone! Everything will be gone! The God will bring us his power; give us the tasks that we were made for." The figure's voice rose in a chant. "The God will bring us blood."

The other replied, "The God will bring us fire."

"The God will bring us death."

"The God will bring us-"

The chant interrupted by a wheezing noise, like a giant coughing up a roll of rusty wire.

"It's them!" and they both hid. But what appeared was instead a tall blue box, with a flashing light on top.

* * *

"Does the TARDIS often bring you to places you have been before?" asked Leela.

The Doctor turned, flicking his long scarf aside, and looked at his companion. For a savage jungle-girl, she could sometimes ask the most uncomfortable questions.

"First of all, it's I who chooses where the TARDIS goes, not the other way round," he replied. "And secondly, the universe is full of new things to see. I don't usually see any point in going back for seconds." He paused and considered. "Sometimes, if a place is of some consuming interest, or if I want to see how folks are doing, I'll drop by. Just informally, mind you. I don't want to cause a fuss."

"Did you think Xoanon was of consuming interest?" she asked. The Doctor winced inside: he'd helped some folks who'd been having a spot of trouble with their computer, and had returned generations later to find those same folks split into two factions, the hunting tribe called the Sevateem (Leela's people) and the scientific Tesh. Said split having been engineered by the computer he'd fixed, now calling itself Xoanon, and quite mad.

"No, no, just random chance we crossed paths again. Now this," he adjusted the TARDIS' controls, and the bobbing column in the centre of the console slowed and stopped, "this should be more your speed." With a flourish, he touched another control to activate the viewer.

The Doctor and Leela both stared at the landscape outside. The Doctor, who had been expecting the varicoloured forest of Thepp II to be revealed, was nonplussed to see a landscape of endless, billowing white. He frowned, and touched the controls again; their view panned, showing only more whiteness.

"Is that snow?" Leela was curious; she knew snow only as something seen far off on the tops of mountains. She looked down at herself, wondered if she should get a coat from the TARDIS' seemingly endless wardrobes. Right now she was only wearing the brief garb of a warrior: a leather top, woven loincloth and soft boots. "Can we go outside?"

"Hang on." The Doctor consulted his control panel. "It's too warm outside for snow. It could be-"

She knew full well that the Doctor could spend hours talking about what it could be or might be, and she wanted to see what it was. Rather than wait, Leela tripped the appropriate control panel lever and quickly dashed through the TARDIS' opening doors.

"-dangerous. Wait!" said the Doctor, and followed her.

Outside, Leela was staring at the land. Everything was covered with the white stuff. There wasn't a speck of green as far as she could see. If this was 'winter', she did not think it was very pretty. "I thought snow was supposed to be cold?" she asked, leaning over and poking at the stuff. "And all in little bits like sand." This felt more like cured leather. And it was warmer than the ground ought to be, whatever this season was.

"Yes, well, this isn't snow. Obviously," said the Doctor, stepping out of the TARDIS. "It seems to be some sort of fungus." He looked at a long, straight rod poking out of the fungus next to him, and picked at it. "Shaped metal; could be made by intelligent life."

"You think there are people here? Where are they?" Leela couldn't imagine anyone living here. It would be like living in the middle of a plain, with no shelter and nothing to eat. Not even grass.

Behind them, something that resembled a small stylised mechanical dog pushed through the doors of the TARDIS. Leela looked down and asked, "K-9, where would the people be here?"

"Insufficient data, Mistress," said K-9, in his prim robotic voice. "Do you wish me to perform a sensor scan?"

"Doctor?" She looked up, and saw the Doctor looking at a small red thing in his hand. It had a little light in it that was blinking.

"Should K-9 do a sensor scan?" she asked.

"Hmm?" he said, distracted. "You know, I've been hauling this etheric beam locator around in my pocket for centuries, and it still works! Someone around here is using some fairly sophisticated electronics. I wonder where they are - an underground civilisation?" The Doctor absent-mindedly closed the TARDIS door and wandered off to his left, staring at his little red device. "Come along, K-9," he said, and the little robot obediently trundled after him, its wheels scraping over the strangely soft landscape.

Abandoned, Leela considered what to do. It did not look like this was a place worth exploring, it was all the same! Although it was not perfectly flat now that she looked at it, there were hills and valleys under this white 'fungus'. There could in fact be houses, or people, hidden somewhere. Then a flash of movement caught her hunter's eye. It was gone in an instant, but for a moment it had looked like a man's head, wearing something red. She moved as though to go after it and then stopped, considered waiting here for the Doctor. Then she had a happy thought: the TARDIS was the only blue thing in sight. She could go as far away as she wanted, and then just turn back and look for the big blue box.

So she went to her right, moving towards where she had seen the flash of red. Behind her, the fungus on which the TARDIS rested started to puff and bubble. And then, very slowly, it started to ooze upwards.

* * *

There was a path through the fungus after all; it was hard-packed earth edged on both sides with glittery black powder that did look like sand. And it was straight, not the meandering trail that animals would make. Leela stood on the path and watched in fascination as some of the fungus oozed towards the powder, touched it and then retreated.

"I'm trying to be accommodating, Stor-" came a voice, and two people walked around a curve in the path and into Leela's line of sight. Her hand went to her belt knife, reflexively.

The one in front, a youth, put a hand to his knife in turn: it was in a fancy shiny sheath, and the hilt was a marvel of ornate metal gleaming between his white-knuckled fingers. But it was not the sheath or the handle that mattered, she reminded herself: it was the quality of the blade. And the quality of the one who held it. Her eyes flicked over the youth, measuring. His stance was all wrong for a serious attacker: he was presenting himself face-on to intimidate, not sideways to extend his reach and protect his torso. She dismissed him for the moment, and her eyes went to the second person.

He looked to be not much older than Leela, but his exact age was hard to judge because of the terrible calm that lay over his expression. He was dressed in loose blue clothes, and a red headband was wound around his head. There was something uncertain in the way he moved, like he was very old. But his eyes were disturbingly intent as he looked at Leela. She couldn't decide if he was dangerous or not - and that was dangerous.

She stood straight and looked at them.

"Who are you and why are you dressed like that?" said the younger man, in a harsh demanding tone.

Leela raised an eyebrow. "I am Leela, and I dress as a warrior. What are you dressed as?" she asked, looking at the too-large jacket he wore. He scowled defensively.

The older man came forward a pace or two. "This is Student Stor," he touched the younger man's shoulder as though to hold him back, "and I am Teacher Ravon. And I apologise for changing the subject, but have you noticed what the fungus is doing to your boots?"

Leela looked down and was aghast to see that her leather boots were covered with puffy white balls that seemed to be growing even as she watched. She raised her foot and shook it frantically, but the fungus was stuck - and she was afraid, now, to touch the white stuff with her fingers. What if it started to grow on her flesh as well? "How do I stop it?" she cried, looking at the two men.

"Allow me," said Ravon, stepping past Stor and spraying Leela's boots with something out of a bottle he pulled from his pocket. The fungus shrivelled and fell off, and when Leela looked more closely, she could see that her boots were dusted with tiny black glittery speckles now.

"Thank you," she said with a bright smile. Ravon did not smile back; instead he looked at her with that same intent expression.

"Are you from far off?" he asked.

Leela thought for a moment, and  decided to answer . He had saved her boots, after all. "Yes, very far."

"Ah," he said. "Well, your boots should be all right now, but you might want to get some cloth that is coated with  repellent as well. Stor and I are going to the Bunker, and they have ample stores of the material there. Perhaps you would like to accompany us?"

"I do not have anything to trade for your cloth," she pointed out practically.

"If you come from far off, perhaps you could trade us a story of where things are like where you are from." Ravon smiled vaguely. "You know, exactly how far off 'far off' is, how many there are of you, and so on." There was something unnerving about the combination of that vague smile and the intent stare.

Leela saw no problem with talking about her tribe, because after all, how could this man get from here to the jungles of the Sevateem? Nothing she told him could harm her people, so far away. It seemed rather canny to her, to give him useless information. She looked at the scowling Stor, who reluctantly took his hand off his knife (after Ravon cleared his throat) and marched up the path. Leela and Ravon walked after him, side by side.

"Why do you not get rid of this fungus?" she asked him. "Just spray your black dust everywhere and kill it?"

"Oh no, we can't do that," Ravon replied. "You see, this fungus is genetically engineered, to absorb poisons from the soil and then break them down into harmless elements. It covers all of this, which used to be the Wastelands." He gestured with both hands, encompassing the horizon. "As far as you can see, and very deep into the ground as well. The poisons had soaked in here over generations; nothing whole could grow here, and what did grow was deformed and often poisonous as well."

"What poisoned the land?" Leela asked.

"The war, of course," he said, glancing at her. Leela knew that tone; it was the everyone-knows tone that meant she should not tell him that she knew nothing of this war.

Instead she asked, "Were you a warrior?" The way he moved could be due to some injury, rather than age.

"I was…once." He touched the wide red band around his head, almost stroking it with his fingertips.

* * *

K-9 was making a valiant go of it in following the Doctor, and fortunately his metal composition was not exciting the fungus the way that Leela's leather boots had. But the surface bubbled and swelled around him, as each patch of fungus 'tasted' him, found him not worthy of devouring, and let him move on.

"Master," he finally said. "I am impeded." The fungus had risen all around him, forming a little valley with him in the middle. And he was not designed to jump, only roll. He deployed the blaster in his muzzle and zapped some of the fungus, but it just seemed to bubble more.

"Hang on, K-9, this is very interesting." The Doctor stood in front of an erect tube-shaped section of fungus that was partially covering some sort of machine. The machine glowed: the core of it was a glass tube alight with flickering, dancing patterns. Familiar patterns. He'd seen this device, but where? And when?

He wrapped the end of his long multi-coloured scarf around his hand, and peeled back some of the fungus; a flurry of black dust came out as well, and the fungus started to retreat on its own. The dust must be some sort of  repellent , released by his motion. 

He stared at the device, paying no attention to the bubbles of fungus that were starting to grow on the end of his scarf where it had dragged on the ground. The way the core was surrounded with thick metal cables, the angles of the casing, the details…he'd seen this - aha! He remembered!

"A particle fountain! That's what it is, a particle fountain for neutralising background radiation," he said, beaming. The smile froze on his face, and swiftly retreated. Eyes wide, he whispered, "I never did find out, though, if they named it the Kaled particle fountain. Or the Davros particle fountain."

"Master!" said K-9, still unable to move. The Doctor turned, fast, snapping his scarf and sending the fungus on it flying. He saw the overgrowth now and quickly scuffed his scarf and his shoes in the pool of black dust; a fine cloud of the stuff rose around him, and the fungus that had been growing on his clothes withered. With two long strides he was at K-9's side, and picked him up and turned him end-for-end before setting the robot down.

"K-9, I know where we are now. This is Skaro. We have to find Leela and leave, now!" Suiting actions to words, the Doctor dashed back in the direction of the TARDIS, with K-9 determinedly ploughing along in his wake.

They retraced their path to where the TARDIS should be, and stopped. "Leela!" shouted the Doctor, turning. No sign of a woman in brown leather, or a large blue box. The TARDIS was the only coloured thing in sight, he couldn't have missed it. "Leela?" Of all the planets to lose a companion on, he would choose this one!

"She has moved out of sensor range," said K-9, rolling to a stop.

"K-9, where's the TARDIS?" The robot spun on his centre axis, and finally stopped with his head pointing at a large mound of fungus. Very large. And getting larger.

"It has been covered, Mast-," said K-9, only to be shushed by the Doctor dropping to a crouch and clamping a hand over his muzzle. He shut down his voice system, and like the Doctor, listened.

There was a voice in the distance, a grating mechanical voice. A voice that the Doctor knew far too well. It said, "Ninth Patrol reporting. Unable to locate source of anomalous energy emissions-"

Black-clad hands were on the Doctor suddenly, on his body and limbs and grabbing his clothing. They dragged him up and to the nearest hillock, and over it. He kicked and thrashed, but there were too many hands. His scarf was pulled tighter, around his face and mouth and cruelly tight around his neck, and he couldn't even cry out.

K-9 was unable to stop his master's abduction, but he immediately prepared to follow. The little hillock was steep enough that he would be unable to go up its slope. He would have to go around and - no, that way was blocked too. Should he find the Mistress first, and enlist her help in rescuing the Doctor? He turned in the direction she had gone - and was confronted by a metal pillar, decorated with gleaming half-spheres. He tilted his head back to raise his sensory array, and saw three of the pillar-things, each one with an eyestalk at its domed top, staring at him. There seemed like robots, but K-9's sensors detected life signals within them. Life? Was this not a robot, but a vehicle, a tank?

Each of these domed robot-tanks was armed, with inbuilt weapons aimed unerringly at K-9.

"We have located the anomaly," said the Dalek.


	2. Acquaintances

Leela and the two men had followed the path until it merged onto a road that seemed to be made of one great flat stone. They followed the road to a stone tunnel, and down it: the tunnel zigged and zagged, and had metal boxes along the sides of it that probably held weapons. Leela kept her hand on her knife.

They finally reached the end of the tunnel, and a massive metal door. A voice came out of a box above the door. "Present identification and state the nature of your business."

Ravon reached into his pocket and pulled out a metal card, which he held over his head. "Teacher Ravon, Red pass. I have Student Stor here with me, for a tour of the Bunker. And Leela," he looked over his shoulder at her, then back to the door, "a foreign woman, a traveller."

"There's no tour of the Bunker on the schedule, Teacher Ravon," said the voice.

"I have a Red pass, Tane. If there's no tour on the schedule, let us in anyway and mark me down as meeting with my physical therapist." Ravon's words might be hostile by themselves, but his tone was still flat and relaxed.

Those words must have worked, because the metal door opened and the three of them entered. The door slid shut behind them, with great firmness.

Inside was a metal room: metal all over, like a Tesh place, thought Leela. There were men in black carrying guns, and a man sitting behind a console of some sort. A metal arch was at her right, with more metal boxes attached to it.

"Captain Tane. Thank you for letting us in," said Ravon, but all of Tane's attention was on Leela.

"She's brown," said Tane, with a frown; he was dark-haired and looked like he usually frowned.

Leela looked at her own tanned arm. Had these men stayed in their boxes so long that they did not remember the sun? "Of course," she said, puzzled. "The sun makes you brown, everyone knows that."

Ravon looked at her, as he stepped up to the metal arch and stood under it. "You are from far off," he said, and then the arch started to whine.

Leela crouched and touched her knife; the boy Stor laughed at her movement, but she ignored him. The arch was whining and Ravon was standing still, seeming to ignore the terrible noise. Then the noise ended, and he stepped out of the arch, unharmed.

"No metal detected," said Tane.

"Except for the usual," said Ravon, touching his forehead. "Stor, your turn."

Stor pulled the knife and sheath from his belt, and placed them on Tane's console; while he went through the arch-whine ritual, Ravon came over to Leela and spoke to her softly.

"I would very much appreciate it if you would leave that weapon here," he said. "This is an important place, and we have very important people working here."

"Captain Tane," said a new voice, and Leela looked up to see a woman with long dark hair, standing beside the Captain. The woman continued, "Is this the traveller?"

"Yes, ah," and Tane stumbled, as though not knowing what to say.

"I am Third Outer Speaker, called Thoss," said the woman, reaching out and touching Leela's hand on the knife hilt. But not as though to stop her drawing it: it was more a gesture of respect, recognising that Leela had a weapon and could use it. She looked up at the taller woman, and said, "Are you of age to take oath?"

Leela calculated: she was past First Moon, named as a warrior by her people, and she'd been travelling with the Doctor for - how long? Surely it would be safe to say - "Yes."

"Will you swear by your name not to draw this knife except in self-defence?" said Thoss. She tilted her head, and her silver earrings glittered in the overhead light.

Leela's free hand touched her throat, shoulder - and then paused, as she realised that this ritual didn't mean anything  here and now . Instead she said, hunting for the right words, "I am Leela of the Sevateem, and I swear by my name not to draw my weapon except to defend myself."

Thoss pulled a long red cord from the pocket of her grey outfit and said, "Fair enough." She leaned over Tane and whispered, "You know how he is about meeting travellers in their natural state," emphasising the 'he'. She reached out and tied the cord in a series of loops around the knife's hilt and sheath; Leela could see that she could still draw the blade, but once she did, the knots would unravel. Clever, she thought.

She went through the arch-ritual then, which was quite painful: the noise made her bones shake and her ears hurt. But she passed the test, it seemed, and the inner door opened.

Student Stor hesitated for a long moment, before going through the door. Leela, who really wanted to see this rude boy get taught a lesson, moved after him, and Ravon followed up behind. As the door closed, Leela looked over her shoulder and saw the room, and Tane and the other men, but not Thoss. Where had she gone?

"Well, Stor," said Ravon, "here is the Bunker. And as you can see, the floor is not made of gold, nor are there great heaps of foods everywhere that are being withheld from the Kaled people-"

"I've only seen the corridor so far," said Stor witheringly. "I need to see more. I need to know everything!"

"An excellent attitude," said Thoss, walking smoothly around the corner in front of them. As smoothly as a predator stalking prey, thought Leela. Thoss' eyes were cold, as they flickered over the visitors. The other woman was now wearing a black uniform, with a red six-sided pattern marked on the collar. She came up to them and took both of Ravon's hands in her gloved ones.

"Hello Ravon," she said, her serious face lightening in a brief smile. Leela frowned; this woman looked just like Thoss, down to the little disk-shaped earrings, but how had she changed clothes so quickly? And why did she seem shorter? She could not remember if Thoss had been wearing shoes or not; this woman was wearing high shiny boots.

"Are you not Thoss?" Leela asked suspiciously. There had been a woman in her tribe who had borne two children at once. Twins, could this be Thoss' twin?

"I am not Thoss," she confirmed.

"An introduction is in order, I think," said Ravon. "Student Stor, Leela of the Sevateem, be pleased to make the acquaintance of Security Liaison, called Esselle." The woman called Esselle gave a little bow of her head without letting go of Ravon's hands. "She is a Daughter of Skaro; they all look the same."

"So, Teacher," Esselle asked, "what are we teaching today?"

"Student Stor is under the impression that the Elite are hoarders, saving all manner of good things for themselves. As I have visited the Bunker on occasion, I thought a brief tour would enlighten him."

"I see," said Esselle. "And you?" she said to Leela.

"I'm - here to trade tales of my travels, for cloth to keep away the fungus," she said awkwardly.

"Good trade," opined Esselle. She finally let go of Ravon's hands, as though reluctantly, and turned to Stor. The boy's eyes showed white all the way around now: he apparently found this Esselle very frightening. Leela looked at her, and thought he might have reason: Esselle reminded Leela of something small and deadly, like a jungle horda.

"Well, Stor, if you want to see how we really live in the Bunker, clearly we should visit the personal quarters. At this hour we shouldn't scare anyone out of the shower. Please, follow me," she invited, and they did.

They went through several metal tunnels, passing men in stiff white clothes or marching men in black with guns. They all stared at Leela as they passed, and she started to wonder what they were looking at. Finally they came to a place where several metal tunnels came together.

"Quarters," said Esselle. "So Stor, pick a room. Any room."

"Any room?" he said, his voice uncertain. Then he pulled himself together, and pointed down one corridor. They all walked down it, and he pointed at the second door down on the right. "This one."

Esselle held up one hand as though to make a suggestion, then stopped. With the other hand, she touched beside the door Stor had chosen, and it opened.

Inside, the room was barely large enough to hold all of them. Lights came on as they entered, but there was not much to see. A single narrow bed, with a metal box at the foot of it. A console like Tane's, but smaller, with no controls on it. Another, smaller door in the wall to one side (Leela believed in always counting the entrances and exits).

"These are the standard personnel quarters, Stor. One bunk, one desk, one bathing facility. One floor, one roof. Four walls. And that's all."

"I don't believe it," said Stor, looking around the room - not that this was very far to look. "My room in the Dome is bigger than this! This must belong to one of the guards. Someone from Security. Not one of the Elite!"

Esselle took a piece of paper off of the desk and handed it to  Stor **.** "Here's a memo, you can read who it's addressed to yourself," she suggested, pointing to some markings at the top of the page.

Stor stared at the page, seeming to be frightened again. He looked up at his teacher, then down at the paper. "Na-"

Esselle suddenly looked sad. "No, that symbol with the underline is Ny." Her finger moved. "And this one is De, and the third one is R, as in stand-alone R, not R with a vowel." She glanced at Ravon, who gave a minute shrug.

Stor's lips moved, and then he looked up at Esselle too fast with his eyes too wide. "Nyder. Security Commander Nyder."

"Yes. You were right, it is someone from Security," said Esselle encouragingly.

The paper was shaking in Stor's hands. "But…he's the Bunker Security Commander! He could have anything!"

Esselle spread her hands wide. "And this is what he has, Stor. This is Commander Nyder's bunk, this is Commander Nyder's chair, and these are Commander Nyder's boots," she said, turning to the door. "With Commander Nyder in them."

The door had opened silently, admitting a cold-faced older man in a black uniform like Esselle's. But he had silver buckles on his uniform's shoulders, and the collar symbol was an eye and a lightning bolt. His gaze raked over the four of them, and settled on the cringing Stor.

"What is this boy doing in my quarters?" he asked, in a harsh nasal voice.

"Hello Nyder," said Ravon, his voice as calm as ever. And his eyes more intent than ever. Nyder looked at the other man, and then away, and Leela caught the hint of a smile on Ravon's lips.

"Teacher Ravon is giving one of his students a tour of the Bunker, to disabuse him of the notion that the Elite are some sort of decadent lounging aristocrats," said Esselle. Leela was not sure what an aristocrat was, but this man Nyder held himself like a predator. Her hand fingered the red cord woven around her knife.

Nyder's head jerked. "Security Liaison. Outside." She stepped out into the corridor, but the door stayed open. Leela strained to listen, but Nyder's voice was too low, she could only hear the last word "-privacy!"

"I did not choose the room, Commander," replied Esselle. "Student Stor chose it at random."

"That is unimportant," Nyder said, louder now. "You could have chosen another room."

"Stor would not have been convinced then."

"All these papers!" said Stor, who was still looking at the desk. "Is this all work?"

"Yes," said Ravon, moving to stand behind the desk and look down at the paperwork. "You might complain about after-hours schoolwork, Stor, but the Commander carries a workload far heavier." He bent a little, as though about to sit.

"Do not sit on my bunk!" snapped Nyder as he stepped into the room again, and Ravon straightened. "All of you, out!"

The three of them obediently filed out and joined Security Liaison in the corridor. Stor was looking at Nyder with an expression of awe. Nyder's cold eyes settled on Ravon.

"Teacher Ravon. You will please move your tour to another area of the Bunker - Central Stores should be a good place. And report to Tane when you leave, so that he can notify me at once." Ravon and Stor left, and Nyder's attention turned to Leela. He looked her up and down, slowly, with a look on his face like a man trying to decide where to strike an enemy.

"You are the traveller?" he finally asked.

"Yes," she replied. And stared back, measuring him in turn.

"I understand that you have stories of your travels to tell. Our Supreme Commander is fascinated by travellers, and would very much like to speak to you. Now." His tone did not leave any room for rejection of this suggestion.

Leela said softly, "You lead." As Nyder walked down the corridor with Leela behind him, and Esselle trailing behind them both, she eyed his straight back - and wondered how Esselle was eyeing her in turn.

* * *

The Doctor was hauled running and stumbling some distance, fast enough for him to quite lose his breath. When he finally was brought to a halt, he thrashed and freed his arms from his scarf (which had been wound around them as a crude restraint device) and then tore the scarf from his neck. Breathing in deep gasps, he looked around him. There was no way to tell exactly how far he had come: the landscape looked exactly the same. Perhaps instead of landscape, he should think of it as fungusscape.

This looked like a camp of some sort: there were tents of black cloth, and racks with great slabs of the fungus drying on them. He was surrounded by grim-faced and grubby men wearing a strange mish-mash of military gear, augmented by leggings and cloaks lined with some fabric woven with black glittery thread. This was another confirmation that he was on Skaro: there had been a thousand years of war here, with each side losing more and more of its technology over time, until plasma beams and radiation bombs were replaced by clubs and spears.

But the war was over. He had been there when it ended. The fungus was the proof of it: it had been a major part of the Peace Accords, that the fungus and the particle fountains be exchanged between the two sides, the Kaleds and the Thals, as a token of good will. So why were these men still in combat gear?

"Hello," he said. "Are you Kaleds or Thals - or maybe Mutos?" Mutos being the outcasts of both races. At his feet, one of his captors was lacing crisp black leggings around the Doctor's own legs: ah, he thought, that must be to repel the fungus.

"We are none of those," hissed one of the men, and then stopped. He stepped forward, and shoved back the rough white hood covering his face. "I know you!" he said.

"What?" The Doctor frowned, his eyebrows crinkling, and said slowly, "Didn't you beat me about the shoulders with a rubber truncheon at one point or another? Lonrie, that's the name! You're assigned to the Kaled Bunker, correct?" Lonrie had been one of the guards there, a rather brutal fellow.

"I have taken a higher calling," said Lonrie. The he turned and addressed all the men.

"I know this man!" he half-shouted. "He is not a Kaled, or a Thal, or a Muto. He is an alien, like the Daughters of Skaro! Like them!" Lonrie drew a brutal-looking knife out from under his jacket and pointed it into the distance, where a too-symmetrical lump suddenly resolved itself into the Kaled Dome.

The hand holding the knife turned as Lonrie pivoted, until the tip of the knife was pointed directly at the Doctor's chest.

"Alien," said Lonrie. "He's working with them, working for them! We should kill him now!"

The Doctor interrupted. "This fungus-repelling cloth is quite advanced. Tell me, do you make it yourselves?"

Another of his captors scowled, and said, "No. They make it in the Dome, and distribute it. We take what we need. We live out here, and eat the fungus."

"Oh, well, how is it?"

"Dull," said Lonrie and there were groans of displeasure from some of the watchers. "But you can live off it. We have shelter and food and warmth, they tell us if we want more we can come to the Dome, but that there is enough here for us to be happy. Happy!" he said, and spat. "It has been this way since the end."

"The end of what?"

"The end of the war. The end of everything." Lonrie sheathed his knife and raised his hands beside his head; his fingers pointed upwards like ears - or horns. "But we have faith. Faith that the God of War will return, will lead us in bloodshed and slaughter as we were born to do! When His avatar is revealed, it will be Kaled against Thal, both against Muto, and death for all!" Lonrie's eyes were wild, and the men around him were raising their hands in the same gesture. "One of us shall be called by the God. To become His avatar, and lead us again to holy war!"

"Holy war?" asked the Doctor incredulously.

Lonrie's gaze dropped from the sky to the Doctor's face, and he said in a chill voice of absolute conviction, "All war is holy."

The Doctor swallowed.

"Perhaps the calling of the avatar of this generation requires sacrifice," said one of the men slowly. All eyes turned to the Doctor, who flashed his most disarming grin. When he tried to back away, he found that the black leggings had been tied together with straps, immobilising him like a man in a sack. He tried a tentative hop or two, as they moved towards him.

* * *

The Supreme Commander's place was full of machines and drawings of machines, and the console there was very large. It was piled with sheets of paper, and sitting on the papers was the skull of some ancestor, inlaid with metal - at least Leela hoped that it was only a skull, and not something more. Beside the console was a chair covered with gleaming metal spheres, and sitting in the chair was a man wearing a stiff white uniform, like the others out in the corridor. He rose to his feet as Leela entered, his eyes full of interest. Nyder stayed by the door, and Esselle moved forward and to one side, watching the visitor carefully.

Instead of talking to her, the man in white circled her, staring as though her brown hair and skin, her leather garb, were all of consuming interest. She kept her hand carefully away from her knife, and watched him out of the corner of her eye. When he came to a halt in front of her, she saw a man about the same age as Nyder, slight and intense, only a little bit shorter than herself. He held himself like a leader; but there was something a bit wild about him, that reminded her of a shaman. And while Ravon had moved like an old man, this one moved like a young boy, full of energy. The skull on the console was something a shaman might have. That was bad; shamans should not be leaders.

The man tilted his head a bit to one side, his eyes almost dancing as they flickered over her clothes and hair. Leela was unnerved by this treatment, but she waited calmly, not revealing her emotions. She would not let them frighten her.

"I am Davros, of course," said the man without any preamble. Leela recognised the everyone-knows tone again. "And you - a tropical or subtropical climate, full nutrient and caloric requirements met during your youth and adolescence - that accounts for your height and excellent muscle tone. Show me your teeth."

"No!" she snapped. "I am not an animal!"

"Oh, excellent," said Davros, and smiled, showing his own straight white teeth. "Your people have done well for themselves, that they can risk sending a lone woman to meet with me."

"I did not come here to meet with you," Leela replied.

"Oh? Why not?"

She shrugged. "I've never heard of you."

Davros stepped back a pace, looking affronted. "You've never heard of me? The Supreme Commander of the Kaleds, greatest scientist of this age, the creator of the Daleks and you say you have never heard of me?" He brushed his dark forelock aside and came right up to Leela, staring into her eyes as though looking for falsehood.

"Never," she said, and let a look of boredom come over her face. "I come from very, very, very far off."

"How many days did it take you to get here?" asked Esselle; she had shifted her vantage point, and Leela guessed that she was holding some weapon in her concealed hand. It said a lot for the other woman's confidence that she thought she could drop Leela before she could draw and use the knife. Of course, there was Nyder as well, watching Leela's back.

"It did not take me days, not days as you know days," she said. "I travelled here by machine."

"By machine? An aircraft?" asked Davros curiously.

"Impossible," said Nyder. "Even if one was in storage on some island, it would no longer function after all these centuries."

"The machine does not fly, it moves from place to place without wings or wheels." That ought to confuse them; it certainly confused her. She had never quite figured out the TARDIS.

"How many people does this machine hold?" asked Esselle.

"Oh, it could hold many. But there is only me, K-9 and the Doctor now," Leela said, and at her words suddenly everyone was moving. Esselle revealed a small shiny gun and moved to flank her; and she saw Nyder moving into position at her other side. Leela's hand went to her knife and she backed towards the door, her eyes trying to keep track of all three of them at once. What had she said?

"Keep back, Davros!" hissed Nyder, but Davros was instead moving towards Leela as though to grab her. She stepped away, and he followed.

"The Doctor?" Davros said, in an intent voice more arresting than a shout.

The room exploded.

Davros' console spewed fire behind him, blowing apart, the top of it seeming to float for an instant as the bottom half disintegrated. The air was suddenly thick with smoke and flying papers. Leela hurled herself backwards, and slammed painfully into the wall; she could not see the others through the smoke. Shrieking alarums went off, and the lights flickered out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "And these are Commander Nyder's boots. With Commander Nyder in them." - Apparently the Reflectionist pattern includes memories of the film Top Secret.


	3. Guilty!

Leela coughed and gasped; the smoke from the explosion was sharp and acrid. It made her eyes water and the air burn in her lungs. The lights flickered back on, and vaguely she saw a figure in white on all fours in front of her. She reached down and helped Davros to his feet. "Are you -"

All right, she was going to say; but Nyder's gloved hand grabbed her by the belt and hauled her away and against the wall, hard. "Don't you touch him!" he said in a voice with death in it.

Across the room, Esselle inhaled and let out a shriek, which turned itself into a sort of battle cry. Eyiyiyiyiii… And the cry was answered, from all around. People were out there, wailing, and coming closer.

"Will you be quiet!" snapped Davros. Esselle instantly silenced herself, and stood there with her mouth half-open. The wailing noises outside wound down, but there were other noises: distant alarums, people running. Davros turned to Nyder, who had Leela pinned to the wall by one arm and the back of the neck; he was having a hard time keeping her firmly enough against the wall that she could not reach her knife.

"Release me!" she shouted, her cheek against the cold wall.

Surprisingly enough, he did: but only to stand between her and Davros, weapon drawn. The door to the corridor opened, and two of the guards in black came lunging in, weapons raised to fire.

"I need her alive!" shouted Nyder, and they stopped. He pointed at Leela. "She is to be searched, processed, and taken to Interrogation."

"I have done nothing!" she protested, her knife drawn now and back to the wall, the loose red cord hanging down her hip and distractingly tickling her bare leg. The guards moved in carefully, one on each side, getting ready to grab her. She made a feint forward, and then drew back.

Davros had turned his own back on the whole confrontation, and wandered over to look at the remains of his desk. From the floor, he picked up the old skull; the metal inlays and plastic coating had kept it from being destroyed, though it looked a bit cracked. He tapped at a loose tooth absent-mindedly. "So much for my mail," he said ruefully, looking at the papers all over the floor.

"She didn't go near the desk, Commander," said Esselle. Her own weapon was still pointed at Leela and her would-be capturers. "And she didn't strike at Davros after the blast went off. That explosion sounded like a landmine; how would she have smuggled it in? Hidden in her hair?"

Nyder was still glaring. He pointed at Esselle without looking at her. "Call Bunker Integrity, I need the damage to this room recorded and repaired. Contact Ravon and that boy; confirm they all went through the security checkpoint." She turned and pulled a slim metal cable from a socket in the wall, and touched it to her head.

"It's a good thing I wasn't sitting here," mused Davros to himself. "I would have been…would…" and he started to shake. He clutched the skull with both hands, his fingers white. His tremors went unnoticed by Esselle whose eyes were closed in concentration; and Nyder and the guards, who were focussed at Leela. It was finally Leela who had to stomp her foot to startle them, then point and say, "Are you sure he isn't injured?"

Esselle dropped the wire and lunged across the room to Davros, stripping off her gloves as she went. She stood beside Davros and grabbed his arm, pressing her bare hand to his face.

Ignoring everyone else in the room, she said, in a sharp tone, "Davros. Davros, you're here. You're safe, you won't be harmed. Davros. Davros." He kept shaking, paying no attention to her presence. She snapped over her shoulder, "Nyder, I need you!"

"What?" said Nyder, with a frown.

"Flashback. Get over here, Davros needs you!" and Nyder moved swiftly, taking Davros' other arm in both hands and leaning close, speaking softly to him in a reassuring tone. Esselle ran her fingers through her hair and leaned close to Davros, touching her head to his. He jerked, and seemed to come back to himself. The guards' attention was split, half to the intruder and half to this strange ritual; Leela considered making a break for it, but was not certain the door would open for her.

"I," and Davros breathed deeply, "I was just thinking. That if I'd been sitting at that desk. I'd have been b-blown in half." He straightened, and turned back to the guards and Leela, his eyes a bit too wide. Nyder and Esselle flanked him. The skull in his hands seemed to stare at Leela as well.

He lowered his head and spoke with tones of steely authority. "Commander Nyder. Security Liaison. You will find out who has tried to kill me, who has planned and ordered this assassination. You will devote yourselves to this, and nothing else. You have my full authority to draw on any resources you require."

"The first thing we will require," said Esselle, her face suddenly as flat and hard as Nyder's, "is the Doctor."

* * *

Deep under the Bunker, there were hidden places. Laboratories, living spaces and storage rooms all burned out of the solid rock with matter disintegrators. Here, the Daughters of Skaro lived and worked and played, and multiplied, and every one of them wore the same face. It had started out as a way of hiding their numbers, but now it was almost a tradition.

Because the women called the Daughters of Skaro had other names: the Red Hexagon. And the Reflectionists.

Those places were in turmoil now. Davros attacked! The Bunker compromised! And the Doctor - the Doctor had returned!

In a great shadowy underground room, voices hissed in the dark, around a glass table whose top glowed white.

"We have reviewed the contract with the Prime," said one voice. That contract included some extremely specialised knowledge about the future of Skaro and its famous inhabitants. "The Doctor was not to return to Skaro for five thousand years!"

"Then we've won!" said another eagerly.

"Won?"

"Yes! We have changed the future, all futures, and this is the proof of it!"

"We had thought that Davros would have decades, centuries to stabilise before he would have to face aliens. That the Daleks would have time to find and cleave to their destiny. Now the aliens have returned, while Davros is still new in this body, while the Daleks are still weak! And - Security Liaison told the Doctor of her parting out, before he left Skaro before."

A sigh of dismay blew through the darkness, from many throats.

"What can we do?"

"Be strong, my sisters. We are many, and the Doctor is only one. We can continue to work the contract, while protecting Davros and the Daleks. Their strength shall be our strength; their power shall be our power, for all time. The Doctor must be located. We must find if he came here of his own will, or if the Time Lords have sent him again to attack the Daleks."

"And if he is an assassin?"

"Then he must be sent away. By force, if necessary. And we should find Projectionist." She was a Reflectionist with a specialised talent: to predict the future results of current actions. Many times, some minor action of Davros had sent her into hysterics, as her mind had foreseen endless catastrophes cascading out from that point in time. "The Doctor's presence will drive her into a frenzy; she will have to be put into stasis until he leaves."

Assignments were made, search parties formed, and a message sent out that Projectionist should report to the Prime, for evaluation and then time-suspension in a stasis field. But in the excitement, nobody noticed that she did not report.

* * *

"Who's this?" said a tall thin man, as he came out of one of the tents and strode up to the group surrounding the Doctor. "A new devotee?" The men fell back from him; the thin man was probably their leader. He had a forward manner and an arrogantly proud nose.

"He's an alien, Lett," said Lonrie to the thin man. "Like the ones in the Dome. We should kill him!"

"I thought all of those aliens were female?" asked Lett.

"Oh, I'm not one of them," said the Doctor cheerily. He leaned over and ruffled his hands through his loose brown curls. "See? No implants."

"You know about the aliens, though," said Lett. "The ones who have styled themselves the Daughters of Skaro. How much do you know about them, about how they conquered us?"

"Well, only what I've heard," said the Doctor. "I was here a while ago - I'm not quite sure how long -"

"Why?" asked Lonrie, frowning.

"Why what?"

"Why don't you know how long?"

"Oh well, that's harder to explain."

"Bring him something to sit on." A stool wrapped in black cloth was put down, and the Doctor rather forcefully sat down upon it. "Now," continued Lett, "you will tell us about the Daughters and how they got here. The Reflectionists, Lonrie says that is the real name." Lonrie nodded in angry agreement. "Tell me everything you know."

"And?"

"And we may let you keep all your fingers and toes."

"Oh. Well, in that case." The Doctor gathered his thoughts. "Once upon a time, isn't that a nice way to start a story? No?" He looked around at the frowning faces (some of the men were stropping knives on bits of leather or stone) and decided that levity was not the way to go.

"Once upon a time, there was a Kaled military scientist in the Bunker, named Hif. Hif had apparently come up with a way of growing fully-grown Kaled bodies in tanks. Of course he'd never heard of the Reflectionists, so when he grew his first body he didn't shield the tank, and it became - inhabited."

"By the Reflectionists?"

"By a copy of their mind print, they call it a Reflection. They send them out into space, and they are drawn to the newborn, or the newly dead, or the mentally blank. A cloned body, an empty mind - well, nature abhors a vacuum, as they say." The Doctor cleared his throat. "The body came alive, with a mind filled with alien knowledge. Davros found her - Hif had started off with making a woman, you see - and called her J29A. Whether she or Hif built the neural arrays, the metal implants they all have in their skulls, I don't know. Probably Hif, it's not the sort of thing you can make with random materials on hand. And then Davros killed her. But at some point, she transferred a copy of her mind into another body. Maybe it was a second experiment of Hif's, maybe Davros allowed her to grow a second body - anyway, that second Reflectionist escaped, and hid in the Dome I presume."

"And started making more copies of herself," guessed Lett.

"Excellent assumption! And then she infiltrated the Dome political structure, and managed to get five of her assigned to the Bunker."

"You say five of her - are they really all one person?"

"No no, think of them as - think of them as multiple styles of uniform, all cut out of the same cloth. Reflectionists allow quite a lot of variation between their selves, so long as the underlying structure is the same."

"How many are there of them - out there?" asked Lett, pointing up at the sky.

"Who knows?" The Doctor shrugged. "They wear the perfect disguise."

Lett paced back and forth, seemingly deep in thought. Then he turned back.

"And what about the Daleks, did the Reflectionists make them?"

"Davros made them," said the Doctor grimly. "The Reflectionists changed them - into what, I'm not quite sure." The Doctor leaned forward. "What are they doing now? How are they being used?"

"They are the perfect weapons of war," said Lonrie. "If we could bring them to the Faith, they would purge Skaro of life within days."

"Daleks with religion? Oh, that's ridiculous!" spat the Doctor. "Look, I don't suppose I could borrow a couple of buckets of fungus-repelling dust from you, could I? It seems to have overrun my transport, and I'd much rather be on my way and stop bothering you."

Lonrie drew his knife and pointed it at the Doctor again, and suddenly his hand seemed to sprout an extra thumb. It was actually a short yellow dart standing straight up from his wrist, and he stared at it and then fell to the ground limp.

A shower of yellow darts rained down on the men; every man hit by a dart collapsed. The other men yelled and ran, dashing between the black tents and away; Lett was one of the ones who ran. Their white-backed cloaks seemed to vanish into the fungus. And from the hills around the campsite came a familiar wail, the Reflectionist alarum cry. Eyiyiyiyiii…

Several female figures dashed into the camp, fanning out to examine the collapsed men and roll them into more comfortable positions. They were carrying air rifles with canisters of propellant strapped to the stocks. One of the women turned to the Doctor, and her gasp was audible even through the mask. And when she pulled the mask off, he saw the familiar face that he had seen dozens of times here - before. Pale skin, a sharp nose, dark hair and eyes. An average Kaled woman in appearance, a Reflectionist alien on the inside.

"Doctor!" she said. "What are you doing here?"

"I was just leaving, actually," he said. His fingers worked at the straps around his legs, undoing them. "Got any fungus repellent?"

"For you, plenty," she said coolly.

"Have you seen my companions? There's a girl named Leela, and a little robot-"

"What happened to Sarah Jane and Harry?" the woman interrupted.

"Ah, well. I no longer travel with them, is all." The Doctor scuffled his feet a bit.

"Stop!" said one of the other women, holding what was probably a radio to her ear. Without warning, she raised her gun and shot the Doctor in the shoulder. He flinched as the drugged dart hit home, and managed to pull it out almost at once, but still found himself sinking to his knees, muzzy.

"Why did you…do that?" he managed to say, as a woman took each of his arms, and a third stood before him.

Her voice was distorted, by the drug or her mask he couldn't tell. "Someone just tried to assassinate Davros."

The Doctor's eyes rolled back into his head, and he was barely conscious of being dusted with black powder, and then dragged across the fungusscape, to the Bunker. To Davros. And almost certainly, to the Daleks.


	4. Reunions

The Doctor came back to himself at last, to the sound of a hideous whine and a nerve-piercing vibration through his bones. "Oh no," he mumbled, "not that scanner again."

"Multiple energy sources detected," said a nasty voice. "Confiscate them." Rough hands started going through the Doctor's many pockets, making off with his sonic screwdriver, yo-yo, etheric beam locator, and other useful trinkets he carried.

"Any sign of a heavy copper bracelet?" said a familiar woman's voice.

"Nothing," after a second pat-down of the Doctor's arms. "Is it important?"

"It's the most important thing of all. I'll send you a picture of it, Tane; if you find it anywhere, contact me at once." The Doctor blinked several times to clear his eyes, and found himself facing a Reflectionist woman - but this one was shorter than the rest, and wearing a black Kaled uniform.

"S-Security Liaison, I presume," he said woozily.

She frowned. "Most call me Esselle now. Do you have any known drug allergies? I'll admit, we didn't design our weaponry with you in mind."

He shook his head from side to side, to indicate no, while taking the opportunity to scan the room. It looked just like the Bunker entry had before: Security men in black, Tane behind his desk. There was perhaps something a little bit more relaxed about the men in black, but otherwise nothing had changed.

"You'd think with the war over, this place would have been shut down," said the Doctor.

Esselle twitched her eyebrows. "Hardly. This is still a matchless scientific laboratory, full of irreplaceable equipment. And Davros is a bit of a claustrophile; he likes being in small enclosed spaces. Right now, you will accompany me to the main laboratory. Unless you'd rather be taken straight to Interrogation?"

"I heard that someone tried to assassinate Davros?" said the Doctor, following her through the inner doors into the Bunker.

"And here you are," she replied. "One of the most famous would-be assassins on Skaro - the Daleks still think very ill of you." The Doctor winced: he had been caught red-handed attempting a spot of anti-Dalek demolition the last time he had been on Skaro. Natural enough that they would associate him with an attack on the Dalek's creator.

The Bunker corridors looked about the same. The Doctor expected to meet a Dalek around every corner, but there was no sign of them - so far. In the main laboratory, he did see a face he recognised from his last visit here.

"Gharman!" said the Doctor. The Kaled Chief Scientist flinched and turned to look at him. He looked just the same, perhaps a little bit more grey in his black wavy hair. He was wearing the same white clothes as the other scientists, rather than military black as he had worn before.

"Doctor!" exclaimed Gharman, coming forward. "Where have you been? You and your companions vanished out of a locked cell, even the Daleks couldn't find you."

"Well, as well for me that they didn't. The Daleks, are they here?"

Gharman frowned. "No, actually, they've moved out as it were. Taken over the old Kaled capital city, Dal; it was so irradiated it would have taken the particle fountains decades to clean it, but they like it just as it is. Davros authorised their transfer, helped them set up their incubators and casing assemblies. They're self-sustaining at this point."

"That's not good, Gharman. That's-" and he paused, distracted by something on Gharman's face. The Doctor moved forward and stared: there was a small round metal plate set high up in Gharman's right cheekbone, flush with the skin, that looked like -

"A neural array?" he said, pointing to it.

Gharman touched the metal with one hand. "No, just a single relay, not an array. It lets me access the computer directly, but I can't share anything else through it. That would require multiple implants."

"I hope so, Gharman, I hope so," said the Doctor. The Reflectionists moved themselves mind to mind using neural arrays; he hoped that what was behind Gharman's eyes was still Gharman. Then he looked around the laboratory. "I'm surprised to find you still working here. Voluntary employment now, I trust?" Gharman has been assigned to the Bunker during the war, and anyone who tried to leave back then was signing their own death warrant.

"I decided to stay on. Davros gave us the option to leave, saying that the Daughters could take over our roles if necessary. A lot of the scientists asked to be transferred to the Dome: Ronson was one of them. They're working on the same projects we are: soil reclamation, fungi monitoring, improvements of the particle fountains, genetic optimisation of plant life. We share information with the Dome now, over the computer network. And then there's Kavell."

"What happened to Kavell?" asked the Doctor. He remembered a tall sandy-haired fellow, rather anxious.

Gharman leaned close and whispered. "He got married."

"No!" said the Doctor, wide-eyed with astonishment.

"Yes, I couldn't believe it myself. I mean, marriage has been impossible here for centuries; not illegal, just - impossible. All the women kept separate. And he just up and asks one of the new Laboratory Assistants, Selaa, and they got married. The whole ceremony straight out of a book, ring bearer and sword bearer and everything. I stood in the Circle for him." Gharman shook his head, and said again, "Married." There was perhaps a bit of envy in his tone.

Then he changed the subject. "Anyway, what are you doing here?" Gharman's previously friendly face was suddenly washed over with suspicion. "There's been an explosion, in Davros' office. And we heard that an accomplice of yours was captured at the scene-"

"Doctor!" and Leela marched over to him, paying no attention to the two guards following her. "Tell them that I did not try to kill anyone!" she said, gesturing angrily.

"Really, she's a very nice girl, just a bit high-spirited," the Doctor said to the room at large. He leaned over and murmured to Leela, "I hope you haven't got any Janis thorns with you."

"Just-" she said, reaching for her belt pouch - and was restrained by the Doctor's hand over hers.

"Don't bring them out!" he said. Janis thorns were poisoned, and would make a great assassination weapon; it would be awfully suspicious if they were discovered.

"How do these people know you?" asked Leela. "Did you do something here, too?"

"He tried to destroy us!" rasped an angry voice, and everyone in the room turned to the vidscreen. It had lit up, and on it was the dome and eye of a Dalek. It focussed on the Doctor and continued, "You would have destroyed the Dalek incubation chamber, killed our embryos!"

"What is that?" asked Leela in a perplexed tone. The grey thing reminded her of a machine, but it talked.

"That, Leela, is a Dalek," said the Doctor.

The Dalek continued, "And now you have returned, and struck again against Davros!"

"I had nothing to do with whatever happened to him," said the Doctor quickly. "Really, I just got here. I was talking to some, ah, religious devotees I suppose you would call them?"

The Dalek's eyestalk swivelled, and Esselle filled in, "Followers of the war god. We captured a fair number of them, the Dome Healers are evaluating them now."

"They are of no importance," said the Dalek. "The Doctor has returned to Skaro. He must leave. Now!"

"Well, I'd be happy to leave. Right now, if you give the word," said the Doctor cheerily to the Dalek.

"He will not leave until we have proven that he did not attack Davros," said Esselle, staring at the Dalek.

"And what of your slave, Doctor?" said the Dalek. It backed away from the screen, showing its sucker-tipped arm. There was a slim chain hanging down from it, which wrapped tighter around the arm as it rotated, drawing something up into range of the camera.

Leela grabbed the Doctor's arm; the something was K-9. The Dalek's chain was tipped with a wickedly barbed metal spike that had been driven deep into the robot dog's body, near his front; he dangled there, unable to move. "Master!" he cried.

"Your slave is our prisoner," rasped the Dalek.

"He is not a slave. Just a useful mechanism," retorted the Doctor. Perhaps if he downplayed K-9's value, the Daleks would release him-

"He is my friend, you will not harm him!" threatened Leela, putting her hand to her belt where her knife had been. "Let him go!" The Doctor briefly flicked his eyes upwards in exasperation.

The Dalek's eyestalk swivelled to look at Leela. "Is this another slave?"

"I am Leela of the Sevateem, and I will fight you for him!" she challenged.

"You will lose." The Dalek's voice was flat and final. Its gaze turned back to the Doctor. "Doctor. You will keep away from us. You will keep away from our incubators, our city. You are not welcome here. We will release your K-9 slave if you prove that you are not guilty of the attempted assassination of Davros. Then you will leave Skaro. If you are guilty, Davros will punish you, and we shall keep your robot. His disassembly will tell us much." The screen went dark.

"Well," said Esselle thinly, "I hope that inspires you to prove your innocence, Doctor." She gestured with one hand, and the guards who had been watching Leela moved forward, flanking both her and the Doctor. "Perhaps we should visit the scene of the crime." She strode out the door, and the guards' weapons urged the two visitors to follow. In the main laboratory, Gharman and the other scientists watched them leave with puzzled expressions, before going back to work.

* * *

"What we have here," the Doctor said, crouching and turning over the shards that were all that remained of the bottom half of Davros' desk, "is a very nicely contained explosion. If nobody in the room was seriously injured, it means the charge was meant only for the person actually seated at the desk." He rose, and looked with some alarm at the metal-studded chair that had been pushed to one side by the explosion. "That isn't what I think it is, is it?" he asked.

"Davros' original Mark One support chair," said Esselle. "He had it stripped down and turned into ordinary furniture. Reuse, repurpose, recycle, as they say."

"And that?" said the Doctor, pointing at the battered skull sitting on the seat of the chair. He stared at it, as though expecting it to suddenly glow with life. Fortunately it did not, but the metal socket set into the middle of its forehead seemed somehow familiar to the Doctor.

"Davros likes to put his hand on it and say, this was once all of me, here under my palm."

"Ugh," said the Doctor deliberately. Davros had had his mind transferred from the remains of his war-shattered body into a newly cloned one, with help from the Reflectionists. He had apparently kept his original skull as a souvenir. "I presume that the military ordinance used to do this would be easy to acquire?"

"Easy to acquire, impossible to trace," said Esselle. "Standard charge, standard timing device. No fingerprints."

"It exploded when I said your name, Doctor," said Leela. She leaned against the wall, bored with this talk of blast vectors and fragmentation paths. She kept an eye on the guards at the same time, and noticed them peeking back at her quite often, and smiling. She wondered what they were so interested in.

"There was no evidence of a sound-activated trigger," said Esselle. "I think that was just a fortuitous coincidence of timing."

"Fortuitous was not the word I was thinking of. So then," said the Doctor, pacing back and forth and staring at the remains of the desk. "Who are the suspects?"

"The Doctor alien, who previously tried to blow up a section of the Bunker filled with defenceless embryos?" suggested Esselle sweetly.

"The Reflectionist alien, who has infiltrated Skaro and is rebuilding it to her own ends?" said the Doctor, stopping to stare down at Esselle.

"What's an embryo?" asked Leela.

"A baby too young to be born, kept alive by machines. Dalek embryos, in this case," said Esselle.

Leela looked at the Doctor with horror. "You tried to destroy a room full of babies?"

"They were Daleks, not babies," he snapped. "They would have become monsters, like those things that have K-9."

"I bet they went ikki-ikki-ikki at you, asking for a footy-top-ride," said Esselle in a cool tone. The Doctor winced. She continued, "The Daleks could be suspects; perhaps they want to wipe out the Kaleds for good, starting at the top and working down. Although to be honest, you'd expect them just to  plough in here and start exterminating. The followers of the war god despise Davros for ending the conflict. Any number of mentally damaged ex-soldiers. Councilman Mogran, we never did catch up with him. The Thals." She threw her hands into the air for a moment. "Too many suspects."

The intercom buzzed, and Esselle went to it and touched a cable to her head. Her eyelids fluttered, and Leela stepped to the Doctor's side and asked, "What does it mean when she does that with the cable?"

"She had metal implants in her skull, into her brain. She can talk to machines, and talk mind-to-mind with others who have the same implants."

Leela was impressed, that sounded like a very powerful magic. When Esselle turned from the intercom, she looked closely, and could just barely see the hint of metal hidden in the heavy fall of hair.

Esselle's eyes were wide. "You’ve been given a signal honour, Doctor. The Prime wants to meet with you."

"A Reflectionist Prime?" he said, wide-eyed in turn.

"The Prime," she said, as she shooed them out the door.

As they walked down the hallway, the Doctor tried drawing more information out of his captor. "How can there be a Prime here? I thought your original Reflection was damaged."

"It was," said Esselle, not breaking her stride. "But your friend Harry Sullivan's idea, of using the Dome as an antennae, worked splendidly. We have captured a complete and undamaged copy of our Reflection. We are a wholeness now. If Doctor Sullivan should ever return here, he will be showered with appreciation. But," she shrugged, "he does not travel with you  any more ."

They came to the room that led to the  Reflectionists' hidden Laboratory Nineteen; this room had once been a closet, converted into sleeping quarters when the Reflectionists first came to the Bunker. Inside the closet was a surprise: Security Commander Nyder. He hadn't changed a hair: still sleek and sinister, his rimless glasses shining in the overhead lights.

The Doctor stopped in the doorway, and one of the guards had to shove him in the small of the back to get him moving. "Commander. This really is getting to be Homecoming Week. I thought you were to be executed." He vividly remembered seeing Nyder in chains, being judged by Davros and then given over to the Reflectionists for punishment. Quite vividly actually: the Doctor had been chained next to him.

Esselle had taken up her usual position, beside Nyder and a little behind. "No, we were to decide the appropriate punishment," she said. "He was punished."

Nyder looked at the woman beside him coldly, and then back at the Doctor. "While you, Doctor, escaped from custody and then vanished into thin air. That will not happen this time." The door behind him opened, and with artificial courtesy he turned and gestured the Doctor and Leela to go through first. They left the two guards in the closet.

In Laboratory Nineteen, there were various projects going on, all being run by Reflectionists. They stared at the Doctor in passing, and he stared back: searching the room with his eyes for any evidence of Daleks or Dalek technology. He didn't recognise any, but the room was large and very cluttered, so he might have missed it.

Nyder guided the two captives to a large pair of doors on the far side of the laboratory, which slid aside to reveal blackness. Blackness, and an illuminated metal platform with a railing around it, probably an open lift. After the two travellers were on the platform, Nyder gestured and Esselle took up a position in front of him. He clamped one hand firmly on her shoulder before they both stepped onto the platform. Which sank straight down into the darkness.


	5. Primary Motives

The darkness was not empty: there were rows of lights in the distance, rising past them as they went down. The lights seemed bright, but they illuminated only girders, shining isolated lines against the blackness. The noise of their descent was faint, competing with other noises: drilling, the searing whine of disintegrators in use, machinery, distant singing. It was like taking a lift down through an aircraft hanger, but as they continued sinking, the Doctor revised his estimate: like a spacecraft hanger? Like several hangers stacked one atop each other?

And still they descended.

"Did you make all this?" asked Leela in wonder. This did not feel like a natural cave to her, the air was too clean, too dry. "It's huge!"

"A construction crew with matter disintegrators can do a remarkable amount of work, once the power wells are in place," said Esselle dryly. "The Elite know about this facility; we let Davros check our structural calculations before we started."

The Doctor turned and looked at his captors, noting Nyder's hand still clamped tightly on Esselle's shoulder. "Nervous about heights, Commander?" he asked.

"No," he said. "Oculomotor nerve damage, from the war." If that was the case, thought the Doctor, his eyes must be unable to adapt smoothly to darkness, and possibly bright light as well. Esselle would have to lead him around down here. He'd have to remember that.

There was a grating sound as the platform came to a stop. The railing slid aside, and they stepped onto a slightly rough stone floor. There was light here, enough to see a Reflectionist wearing a plain white tunic, apparently waiting for them. "Please, follow me," she invited, and they did.

The space was so large that their footsteps did not echo. There were suggestions, on all sides and above, of movement and activity, but they were all hidden in the dark. They walked for several minutes, hearing tiny noises that suggested they were being flanked by other guards, and finally came to a more brightly lit area. In front of them was some sort of platform, covered with red padding and raised off the stone floor by what looked like ivory tusks that seemed to clutch at its edges. The platform's edge and the tusks were all that could be seen; the darkness was heavy over whatever was seated on the platform.

"Doctor," Leela whispered, "there is something very large in here. With us."

"Greetings to the Doctor," said a woman's voice, both loud and deep, coming from a point somewhere over the platform. It sounded as though the speaker was seated on a high chair. "Greetings to Leela of the Sevateem. I am Prime Mother Kaled-Skaro."

The Doctor tilted his head back to try and locate the source of the voice, but could not even see an outline. He wondered what she thought of her visitors: a man in a motley array of tweed, cotton and velvet; a woman in leather; and the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Esselle and Nyder, side by side in identical black, their white faces seeming to float above their collars in the gloom.

"Ah, are you called Mokaska?" he asked. Most of the Reflectionists took short names that were based on their titles, such as Esselle for the initials of Security Liaison.

"I am called Prime," boomed the voice. "Doctor, your return is unexpected. The fact that it coincides with an apparent attempt on Davros' life is - disturbing. Have the Time Lords of Gallifrey sent you again, to strike at the Daleks and their creator?"

"No," said the Doctor, still looking up into the shadows where the Prime presumably sat. "I am here only by chance."

"Under your own power, as it were," the Prime purred. "Interesting. You should know, Doctor, that we are well set upon this world. We do not wish to leave Skaro - indeed, its technology will not permit us space flight yet. The environmental cleanup must be completed first. We are far from rebuilding the Kaleds."

"And the Thals? I know you infiltrated them as well," said the Doctor.

Nyder cleared his throat. Esselle whispered, "It was the necessary thing, Commander."

The Prime answered, "The Thals have sealed the mountain passes between their territory and the Kaleds. They have chosen their way, and we wish them good fortune on it. There is one pass open: we exchange technology for foodstuffs. A few people move back and forth: traders, specialised personnel."

"But both groups are controlled by the Reflectionists," said the Doctor.

"We do not control them. We work with them and by them. The Universe is our mirror, and every Reflection a little bit different."

Nyder spoke, his eyes too wide as he strained to see in the gloom. "Prime, you asked to see this man before he was tried-"

"Tried?" snapped the Doctor, turning and looking down at Nyder. "I haven't even been charged yet!"

"Do you have absolute proof that this was a deliberate attack, and that he was responsible?" said the Prime.

"That's what the Interrogation Centre is for," he said, staring back at the Doctor menacingly.

A deep chuckle from the platform. "Security Commander Nyder, you are so beautifully focussed on your duty. I envy you that purity of purpose, sometimes."

Nyder swallowed, and looked up at the platform.

"But the Doctor stands outside the usual chain of Kaled authority," she continued. "And he is a powerful and dangerous man, with many resources. I think that it would be more prudent to combine your own efforts to solve this mystery with his skills. You have said that you wanted to clear your name, Doctor."

"I have. I do." One of the Reflectionists in the main laboratory would have transmitted everything he said in the main laboratory down here for the Prime to review, via the M-class cables that were presumably still strung throughout the Bunker.

"Very well. Commander Nyder, this is my suggestion, which I ask you to bring to Davros. Let the Doctor help you in your inquiry-"

"Let the primary suspect help investigate the case?" interrupted Nyder.

"He will be under your eyes, and under ours as well. If Davros decides differently, well. He is the Supreme Commander here. I am the Prime, but his authority is over mine in a matter bearing on his own personal safety. This is only my suggestion, and I am pleased to have been able to present it to you, Commander."

The Commander nodded his head, as shallowly as possible.

"And now I must attend to the nursery," the Prime said with a smile in her voice. The audience was apparently over. Then the Doctor's eyes widened with astonishment. The tusks that overhung the edges of the platform raised themselves, pulled back into the darkness and vanished, and there was a suggestion of vast motion that swiftly faded away.

"Come along!" snapped Nyder, as Esselle turned him and scooted the prisoners into position to leave. Leela looked back over her shoulder. "Those white things, what were they?" she asked curiously.

"Those were - toes," said Esselle. "Or perhaps you would say hooves? Tines?"

"I thought they were part of the furniture," said the Doctor distractedly, trying to remember how many of those tines there had been. More than ten, he thought. "Your Primes do come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, don't they?"

"Yes. She is very beautiful," said Esselle almost wistfully. "It is a pity that she must stay out of sight. She might be mistaken for a Muto, if she were to go outside."

The Doctor could see how that could happen, if each of her toes was the length of a man's arm.

* * *

Nyder had gone to consult with Davros, and Esselle had decided to put the prisoners in a meeting area in the Bunker, a place the Doctor had not seen before. There were loose informal groupings of chairs and metal-mesh tables scattered about, along with several inactive particle fountains and an actual plant, in an elaborate metal pot with several radial arms tending to it. It all seemed very un-military, which was rather cheering actually. Best of all, there was a familiar face: Gharman was there, along with two other men.

"Is radiation still a problem here?" asked the Doctor, pointing at the fountains.

Gharman looked up from his chair, and the piles of papers scattered across the table in front of him. "Those? No, it's just in case of accident. We're still doing a lot of research on mutation obviously; if there's a minor spill we can drag the particle fountains in to clean up. A major spill, and the alarums go off and we evacuate." He gestured, and Leela and the Doctor took seats near him. Esselle stood behind their chairs, watching them carefully.

The Doctor tried to adjust the table, but couldn't; it was bolted to the floor. He looked at the man wearing the red headband, twice, before saying, "General Ravon?"

"Teacher Ravon, now," he said. He still looked the same physically as when the Doctor had seen him last: sandy brown hair, the face of a man forced to responsibility far too young. The cloth covered most of Ravon's forehead, and the Doctor wondered darkly what might be under it. Ravon, as he recalled, had been shot in the head.

Ravon cocked his head to one side, his face and voice unnaturally calm. "I think I remember you. But those memories are - distorted?"

"Reconstructed," said Esselle.

"Of course," he said, and looked at Esselle with something strange in his eyes. Without taking his eyes from her, he said, "Student Stor, this is the Doctor, you've heard of him of course."

Stor blanched. "A real alien?"

The Doctor looked up at Esselle, and she looked back at him, blank-faced. She was a real alien, after all.

"Yes, a real alien," said the Doctor. "How do you do, Stor. Have a jelly baby?" He reached into his pocket, and found that his candy had been left with him. He took out the little paper packet, and held it open in Stor's direction.

"Baby?" he said, looking not at the Doctor, but at Esselle.

"Dessert, Stor. Not made of babies. Tell me what you think of it." She watched him as he put it in his mouth, chewed a few times, and grimaced.

"Too sweet?" she asked and he nodded agreement. She glanced at the Doctor and said, "The sugar content of most of our desserts is quite low. Thank you for your evaluation, Stor," she said, and handed him a small coin.

"So, you've got a monetary system going, instead of just military scrip?" asked the Doctor.

"Yes. Everyone has shelter - more than enough shelter, after the Dome was decontaminated. The fungus is edible, and can be run through the food pill processing plants quite nicely. So basics are free, luxuries cost extra work. The standard unit of coinage is a des - one dessert."

"It's a good start," opined the Doctor.

"I hope you're right," said Gharman heavily. "I never really realised, locked away in the Bunker - no, even before that, raised as one of the Elite - how much we were taking from the people, how much the war was taking from them. Most of them are still too frightened to ask for anything. The best we can do is keep them safe, give them time to heal. The children are our future." Gharman looked at Stor, as though wishing the future did not pout quite so unattractively.

"Did you really try to assassinate Davros?" Stor demanded of Leela.

"Of course not!" she said. "If I had wanted him dead, he would be."

The Doctor winced at her lack of tact. "Actually, Stor, I'm trying to clear my name and hers of that particular suspicion. It seems that plenty of people has a motive for trying to get rid of Davros. The next question would be: who has access to Davros' office, to plant a bomb there?"

Esselle pursed her lips. "That's a better question. Any personnel assigned to the Bunker. Any of the Daughters of Skaro, we carry universal electronic passkeys. Any Kaled with a Red pass-"

"Like Ravon?" asked Leela. Ravon blinked.

"Yes, although a Red pass means the carrier has been cleared for any installation, they're quite rare. We'll have to see if any of them have been stolen lately." Ravon checked his pocket, and confirmed with a nod that he still had his.

"Video surveillance of the corridor outside the office?"

"Was down for two hours, doing emergency maintenance." Esselle looked at the Doctor suspiciously. "Of course, a good assassin could have found a way to sabotage the video system-"

"You haven't mentioned the other possibility, Esselle," said Gharman. Then he stopped himself and looked up; Nyder was standing by the door. The Commander only moved his head a trifle, but Esselle rose and went to stand by him, and he spoke to her, too quietly for them to hear.

"I'm not quite sure I understand those two," said the Doctor.

"Nobody does," agreed Gharman; then Esselle turned on one heel and came back. "Excuse me," she said, taking the Doctor's hand and swiftly handcuffing one wrist to a table leg. "A precaution only. Leela, Ravon, Stor, perhaps we could sit over here, and I could enlighten this traveller on those odd looks the guards keep throwing her way." Esselle firmly took Leela from her seat and escorted her to another one, some distance from the Doctor. She shot a frantic look at her companion, and he smiled and made just-sit-down gestures. Ravon and Stor took seats near her as well.

The Doctor raised his wrist and looked at the handcuff. "Company coming?" he guessed.

Gharman nodded, and looked up: Davros had entered the room. Two Security Elite carrying automatic weapons flanked him. He deliberately chose a seat far enough from the Doctor that he was out of kicking range, and then sat, staring at the Time Lord. One guard stayed at the door, the other one, and Nyder, took up their positions behind Davros.

The Doctor stared as well. He had only seen this Davros very briefly, in a broadcast made just after the Thousand Year War had ended. When the Doctor had first come to Skaro, Davros had been old, old: the shattered remains of his crippled body kept alive only by his support chair. The man he faced now was Davros reborn into a new body, with the help of the Reflectionists.

He was like a young ghost of his previous self: the high cheekbones and broad brow that had been almost buried in wrinkles and scars were now smooth and clear. His new eyes were brown and intent, staring up at the Doctor. Behind those young eyes was an old and brilliant mind, brilliant to the point of madness.

"Doctor," Davros said quietly. "You have returned to Skaro. Why?"

Always to the point, that was definitely Davros. "Well, I didn't mean to. My conveyance landed here by accident, and was absorbed by your fungus."

"Absorbed? Unlikely. I think you mean that the fungus encapsulated it. It is engineered to do that, when it finds something too exotic to directly process. Our sensors should be able to find it."

"Well, if you could do that, I'll be out of your hair at once," said the Doctor with a brilliant grin.

Davros leaned back a bit in his chair. "Why should I aid my would-be assassin to escape justice?"

"Presupposing much, are you?" The Doctor crossed his arms over his chest - as best he could while handcuffed to the table. "Credit my intelligence, Davros: if I wanted to assassinate you, would I send a jungle girl to do it?"

"You may have thought the crudity of the attack would disguise its origin."

"Bah!" he said, uncrossing his arm and pointing at Leela. "Look at her! Tall, tan, savage, she doesn't look Kaled or Thal. She's incredibly conspicuous, why would I endanger her life by sending her anywhere near you!"

They both looked at the jungle girl, who had just doubled over with a peal of laughter at something Ravon had said.

* * *

"So you're saying that you never met women when you were growing up? No women, ever?" Leela gasped, still laughing.

"Yes," said Ravon, calm as ever. Stor was looking fretful, although that might just be his normal expression.

"But what about your mother?"

"There were no mothers or fathers here, Leela," said Esselle. "All women were bred by - by seed taken from men they never saw, and their children were taken away as soon as they were born. Men taught men, and women were locked away, and not taught at all. This has only begun to change in the last few years."

Leela had gradually stopped laughing as the meaning of Esselle's words sank in, and now she shrunk in her chair, with embarrassment. "I - I am sorry I laughed," she said to Ravon. "I did not know."

"But you see," said Ravon, leaning forward, "because of this, all men spending all their time with only other men, seeing woman only in a few stolen pictures - they only bonded with other men. Tall, aggressive men being preferable, because they were better fighters, better able to defend your back."

"And so-" said Leela, not quite understanding what this had to do with her.

"So," said Esselle, crossing her legs, "when a tall, aggressive woman like yourself shows up, you are quite the prize. All the best qualities of the female and the male. Aggression, strength - and beauty. That's why all the guards keep trying to catch your eye." Esselle's look was - envious?

Leela touched her hair uncertainly. "I - among my people, if a man was interested in me, they would bring gifts for my father." She paused for a long moment. "But my father is dead now."

Esselle nodded gravely. "Your sorrow is mine. And I think what most Kaled men would be offering is something a little more short-term than your customs provide for." She leaned forward. "If someone asks and you are not interested, just answer, 'No, but thank you for asking.'" Then she uncrossed her legs, and frowned at a woman who had just entered the room - a woman wearing her face. A Reflectionist.

"And what do I say if I am interested?" Leela said. "Esselle?"

"That can't be who I think it is, can it?" Esselle said, distracted, as the woman wove through the furniture and headed directly for Davros. The guard by the door was following her with his eyes; apparently he had been told to keep people in, not out.

\- - -

The Doctor was still furiously arguing with Davros, and did not notice the approaching Reflectionist. "Davros," he said intently, "I did not come here to kill you!"

"Then explain-" and Davros heard Nyder move away from behind him. "What is it?"

"We are not to be disturbed," Nyder said to a young woman, who stepped around him as though he was not there.

"Davros!" said the woman, coming up to him, smiling. "It's so wonderful to meet you at last!" She moved towards him, still smiling, arms extended -

"Stop her, Nyder!" shouted Esselle, and the Commander lunged - and felt his fingers slip off the back of the woman's grey tunic, as she stepped just out of reach, leaning down now, towards Davros -


	6. Second Strike

The Doctor leaned forward and with his long arms, grabbed one of the woman's wrists and swung her around, off balance. Esselle leaped to the other woman's arm, and they held her stretched out between the two of them. The Doctor was stretched as well, against his cuffed wrist. The woman fought their grip, but her face remained cheerfully smiling. Davros lunged backwards without getting out of his chair, sliding it along the floor with his feet, and Nyder stepped between him and the intruder.

"Under her tunic," Esselle said, digging in her heels as her captive wriggled.

"I'm got to see Davros," the woman said, her cheerful voice and broad smile completely at odds with her fighting movements. Nyder stepped close, grabbed the grey tunic in both hands at the bottom edge, and tore it along one seam - revealing something strapped to the woman's torso.

"Bomb. Bomb! Davros, out! Everyone out! Clear this room!" he shouted, and Gharman and the other Kaled men quickly evacuated the room. One of the scientists dithered a moment, then scooped up the plant and took that as well. The guards grabbed Davros and they left with speed.

"Sister. Sister, who am I?" asked Esselle urgently. Her captive rolled her head, and said, "I don't know - where's Davros?"

"She's drugged. Or damaged," said Esselle, wincing. "I'm the only Daughter who wears an Elite uniform, she should know me from across the Dome! Sister…Projectionist?"

"Yes," she said. "Please let me go. Please? You're hurting me."

"Commander, the trigger is probably on her chest, we can't leave her arms free." Esselle tossed her head at the table behind her. "Cuff her to that." Nyder slipped a pair of cuffs from his pocket, and fastened the wrist that Esselle was holding to the edge of the table. Then she moved and grabbed the other wrist; Nyder unfastened the Doctor and used those cuffs to fasten her to another table. Projectionist was stretched in a kneeling posture, unable to stand. She fought her bonds.

"Why are you hurting me?" she asked Esselle, her eyes full of tears now.

Esselle looked down at her. "This is Projectionist. She was designed to be abnormally sensitive to changes in time." Reflectionists designed personalities and abilities into their various bodies, as easily as changing hairstyles. "The last time the Doctor was here, we had to keep her sedated. There's no way she could walk into a room with a Time Lord and not go into convulsions."

"That bomb may be on a timer-" said Nyder, now standing by the door.

"Good point," said Esselle. She grabbed a long strand of cable that was coiled by the wall, and swiftly fastened one end into the captive's hair and a neural array contact embedded in her skull. Projectionist looked up at her and said, "Sister? Don't you love me?"

Esselle put her hand on Projectionist's face. "I will always love you." Then, walking carefully and paying the cable out behind her, she backed out of the room just behind the Doctor.

In the corridor outside, she fingered the end of the cable she had kept, and then looked up at Nyder. She paid no attention to the cluster of people waiting, including Davros.

"It would be safer, Commander, for me to get a machine interface to process this-"

"I want answers, now, Security Liaison!" he snapped.

She nodded, and touched the wire to one of her own neural contacts. Her eyes closed, and started to roll madly behind her lids - for a moment. Then they stopped, and opened again. Esselle leaned against the wall behind her, and gasped out what was not quite a sob.

"Warn heaven and hell," she said, her voice suddenly thick, and her eyes wet. "A Daughter has died!"

"What?" snapped Davros. Esselle held the wire tight to her head, away from his impulsive grasp.

"Commander, Davros - there's nothing there. No personality, no memories - she barely remembers her own name! Someone or something has destroyed her mind, and implanted one command: to find Davros and detonate the bomb. Someone has struck one of us!" Esselle's face was suddenly white, high spots of colour standing out on her cheekbones. "Someone has taken one of us and destroyed her utterly, taken her memories and her life from us, and when we find them we shall tear them down to the bones while they are still living!"

Projectionist screamed in the room, a desolate sound, and Esselle flinched and pulled the cable free. "I'm sorry," she said. Then she looked at Davros and drew herself to attention.

"Sir. Projectionist has been compromised; we need an analysis of her neural array. That means dissection. We will have to copy off her current memory-pattern into a computer, decompile her. Physically end her life. Is this acceptable?"

"Why wouldn't it be?" Davros asked, sincerely puzzled. Esselle looked at Nyder, and he nodded in assent.

"You can't just kill her!" said the Doctor.

"She is already dead, Doctor," she said bitterly. "Her body lives and breathes, but her mind is gone. I doubt she could count to ten. She knows herself barely, Davros somewhat, and her own suicide mission - and that is all." She dropped her long length of cable, and then fished a shorter one out of a communication box on the wall, and touched it to her head.

"How will you terminate her?" asked Nyder curiously.

"I need a decompilation order first."

They waited for an uncomfortable few minutes, until one of the Laboratory Assistants dashed up with a heavy metal box bristling with connectors; they hooked the long cable to it, and copied what was left of Projectionist's memories into the storage unit. When it was done, they winced at the resulting readings.

"That's all there is?" said the Assistant.

"Yes, Twethla." Projectionist was screaming in the meeting room now, howling and demanding that she be let loose to find Davros, and Esselle's brows were knit tight in sympathy. "Where's that-"

"Esselle," said a tall woman who stepped up to the group. She was wearing a red mask made of some sort of mesh, with no eye or mouth holes, that left only a blank where her face should be. Nyder looked at her and froze for a long instant, as though in fear. She extended a single sheet of paper to Esselle, who looked at it, signed in three places, and then showed it to Davros.

"Personality wheel is blank - that means no memory recovery." She tapped the sections of the paper with her pen as she named them. "My confirmation of less than five percent data recovery from the machine copy of her mind. The Prime has already approved the termination, that's her seal."

Davros took the pen and initialled the paper twice, then nodded. Esselle picked up the long length of cable - and had it pulled out of her hand along with the decompilation order.

"You are not going to feel her death," said the masked woman. "This is not your fault. Stop playing the martyr." She swept into the meeting room, and the screams suddenly wound down and stopped.

Silence.

Esselle went into the room, and a few moments later the two women exited, dragging the limp corpse of Projectionist by the wrists. Her tunic was torn open, and a bundle of dangling straps and wires on her chest led to the (hopefully) defused bomb. "It was on her back," said Esselle as she pulled. As they passed the group in the corridor (who spread out considerably at the sight of the bomb), Esselle detached one hand long enough to give Nyder back his handcuffs. Everyone watched as the two women and their grisly burden went down the corridor.

* * *

K-9 cowered, deep in what had been the Kaled capital city, and was now a city-sized machine with one purpose: making more Daleks.

He had been floated here in some sort of energy field, then cruelly spiked and hung in front of a camera so that these Daleks could taunt his Master. The spike and its chain still hung from the front of his casing. After that message, he had been stuffed into a small lead-lined aperture cut into the side of one of the endless maze of corridors, and ordered not to come out.

"You will not enter the corridor or you will be exterminated!" - those words still rang in his audio processors. But of course he had to escape. He had to find a way to get out, find his Master and Mistress. This was a terrible place, a dangerous place: his sensors detected lethal levels of radiation, and poisonous gasses in the air. It was inconceivable that he should be the cause of the Master having to stay on this planet for one additional second. It was his duty to find a way out. His Master and Mistress were out there, they probably needed his help!

Something landed on his back. He could not turn his head in the narrow space, but his sensors told him that whatever was on his was not very heavy, and decidedly wet. And that it was alive.

It squeaked, and slapped at his sides with its tendrils. Was it some sort of vermin, or was it intelligent?

"I am K-9, and you will not interfere with my casing!" he stated crisply. The squeaky thing squealed and vanished.

Vanished. Where did it go?

K-9 backed up, slowly, expecting at any moment for his antennae tail to hit the back of the niche. But there was nothing there. He kept backing up, and backed through and over a slot where a door seemed to have been removed.

K-9's analysis was that this niche was part of some sort of conduit, or pipe. And the door that had sealed him into the end section had been opened by - something.

Squeaking again. There was more room here, and K-9 pivoted to see three wet lumpy things that he presumed were the squeakers. They waved at him, all their tentacles in the air in an expressive burst of enthusiasm that crossed the species barrier, and then they started to slither backwards, away from K-9 and towards a light at the end of the conduit.

K-9 calculated, and then moved down the conduit, following the squeaky things. The chain trailed along behind him. After all, he was not entering the corridor. Technically.

* * *

In the Reflectionists' secret places, chaos reigned. The loud booming voice of the Prime finally brought all the scampering and chattering to a temporary stop. "Be still. Still. STILL!"

The many women moving through the darkness came to a reluctant halt, listening to the Prime's orders.

"Our bond is compromised, unless we can find that Projectionist had some sort of suicidal mental iteration that rewrote her brain as it erased it. Could she have donned the bomb herself?"

A flurry of brief conferences in the dark. "Yes, Prime. She could have."

"Then we have no proof of an accomplice, one way or the other. We must work on the premise that there is another assassin, who could be a Reflectionist. Send word by radio only, to the Thals' Reflectionists. We may have to break off all communications with them, to prevent contamination. Inform the Daleks as well. Bring machine cut-outs online; all non-vital communication is to go through them. And double-check the cut-outs' programming, using multiple people."

The movement resumed, but this time there was order within the chaos. The Prime leaned on her platform, the weight of her heavy head distributed among three elbows, and thought bleak thoughts. Years of delicate trust built up between the Reflectionists and Davros were being shattered in a space of hours. And Davros was the key to everything. The Prime had dreamed of space, of an empire rising from Skaro and going forth into the universe. And now it looked like her dynasty might not even live another season. Two of her tines tapped out an irregular rhythm on the platform.

But we did change history, she thought. The Daleks are transformed forever; they will never become the monomaniacal monsters that they could have become.

She hoped.

* * *

After the second attack, Davros disappeared into the depths of the Bunker, leaving orders that the four visitors were to be kept on the premises overnight.

"I'll miss my classes tomorrow morning," said Ravon, looking a tiny bit put out.

"We'll call for a supply teacher," said Gharman. "Why don't you have a meal with us?" This seemed like a good plan all around, but some diners found the menu rather off-putting.

"Are these beetles?" asked Leela, poking at the dish of white pills in front of her. "Or eggs?"

"They're processed food pills. Everything necessary to sustain life, in capsule form. The perfect food, really." Gharman tossed his head at one of the Laboratory Assistants across the cafeteria space. "They eat bugs, though," he whispered in a somewhat revolted tone. "Water bugs. Big spiny things."

"Some bugs are tasty," Leela tried to assure Gharman. Perhaps he hadn't tried the right ones.

One of the Laboratory Assistants came over and sat between Leela and Stor; her plate had flat white wet things on it. "A nice plate of grubs would be tasty right about now, wouldn't they?" She smiled at Leela. "In regards to dietary preferences, well, I'm afraid that once you are raised on food pills, everything else just doesn't seem right." She turned to Leela. "Want to try one?" she said, offering one of the flat white things on her fork.

Leela deftly picked it off with her fingers, and ate it. "Mm!" she hummed as she chewed, then swallowed and said, "That is very good!"

"You, Doctor? If you like lobster, you'll like these," the Laboratory Assistant said.

"I always felt a bit sad eating lobster. They have such intelligent faces," he lamented, and then took the Assistant's fork and its cargo. Eyes closed, he chewed.

"Truffled lobster ravioli," he finally sighed. "Marvellous."

"Fungus, water bugs, and synthetic pasta," said the Laboratory Assistant - and then looked up, as Nyder and Esselle sat down across from her, staring unpleasantly at the Doctor. They both took nearly identical poses: one elbow on the table, head in hand, and the other hand transferring food pills to their mouths between words.

"Have you received the results of Projectionist's - tests?" asked the Doctor, thoughtfully giving back the fork.

"Dissection," corrected Esselle. "No blistering of the neural array, so it wasn't electric shock. Her blood tests as drug-free so far. No overall degradation of the array. But it's blank, as though from the head of an infant." She shivered, and took another pill.

"I have been considering, Doctor, the option of moving you and the other suspects out of the Bunker and into the Dome." Nyder's eyes swept the table. "True, the Interrogation facilities there are less than refined, but still-"

"Hang on, I can't investigate the crime from the Dome!" said the Doctor.

"You can't commit any crimes against Davros while in the Dome," snapped Nyder, then dropped his food pill and sat up straight. So did Esselle. Davros had entered the room unnoticed, come up behind them and clamped one hand on each of their shoulders.

"Security Commander Nyder. Security Liaison Esselle." His fingers rippled on their shoulders. "How long have you served me?"

"All my life," they said simultaneously, then exchanged glances.

"Well, practically," said Nyder.

"Literally," countered Esselle.

"And you have served me well - until the two attacks on my person on one day! Today!" He leaned over, his intent face between their frozen ones. "So," his voice suddenly went from furious to soothing, "you can see my dilemma. I need you here, to protect me, to find out who is trying to destroy me. And yet, I need you to be reminded of the costs of failure."

"I recommend postponing-" Esselle's words were cut off by Davros' finger to her cheek. He stood up straight, and his two subordinates sat tremblingly still.

"So. The investigation will continue tomorrow. Both of you will give it your utmost attention, and the Doctor as well - his intellect is too great a resource to leave unused." Davros' voice almost gloated over the next words. "But there must be a punishment. So. You," and he squeezed Esselle's shoulder hard, "will punish him." And he squeezed Nyder's shoulder in turn.

Esselle and Nyder sat ramrod-straight, not even looking at each other as Davros removed his hands and left. Everyone else at the table looked at their food or at the floor, not wanting to increase the embarrassment that practicallysizzled between the two of them.

Esselle was the first to move; she pushed her plate a little farther away from her, as though she had lost her appetite.

In a painfully unemotional voice, Nyder asked, "Shall I order the table cleared?"

Esselle turned to him, jaw stiff. "Absolutely not!"

"Very well." He pushed his plate away as well, and then they both left the table.

Gharman watched them as they walked out of the room, his eyes full of combined sympathy and upset.

"Why would you clear the table?" asked Leela tentatively, not quite sure what was happening.

"For a flogging," he said, and looked down at his pills.

"So why didn't she? Better to be punished and get it over with," said Stor, swallowing a pill. Then he said "What?" indignantly, because everyone at the table was looking at him with exasperated expressions.

Gharman laced his fingers together, and decided to explain. "It's very clear to everyone that Nyder despises Esselle. That he only tolerates her presence because Davros orders it."

"All right," said Stor. "Go on."

"It is equally clear that for whatever reason, Esselle adores Nyder."

"The reason is obvious, Gharman," said the Doctor. "She's an artificial personality, constructed by the Reflectionists specifically to serve Davros and Nyder. She probably can't un-adore him, as it were." The real reason that Esselle had been made as she was, he kept to himself. He was going to have to tell that to Davros directly. When the time was right.

Stor's expression showed unpleasant realisation.

"Therefore, Esselle hates to see Nyder hurt, so if she has to punish him, it's torture for both of them." Gharman frowned.

"That is cruel," said Leela. Just the sort of thing a shaman would come up with, she thought. A real leader would not cripple two people under him by making them fight each other: he would have another do the punishing.

"That's Davros," said Gharman. He picked up a food pill, and then put it back on his plate. "He is better. Better than he used to be. He doesn't have those emotional highs and lows, those storms of emotion. But you can still see the scars that the war left on him. Even after his - transformation, rebirth, whatever you want to call it. He did make it clear that they both are on duty tomorrow, so she won't do anything too damaging." Under his breath, he added, "To either of them, I hope."

* * *

Captain Tane had been just about to go off shift when an unexpected visitor showed up at the main entrance. A visitor who could not effectively be restrained from coming in.

Davros was contacted, and authorised the visitor to enter the Bunker. So Tane hit the switches, and the heavy metal door rolled aside. And the Dalek entered.

It looked the same as the Daleks built by Davros himself: a dull grey body studded with black spheres. There was no way to tell whether other Daleks had built it. A war machine, with a living creature inside. Its inbuilt armaments were enough to demolish the entire facility; Tane's hand toyed with a switch that would call a squad of Daughters to the entrance, armed with matter disintegrators. There were ways to block the disintegrators, but they were not portable enough for a Dalek to carry inside its shell - so far as he knew.

Tane drew himself to his feet, a bit stiffly. The Dalek slid to a halt in front of Tane and droned, "You will take me to Davros."

* * *

Before she went to Nyder's quarters, Esselle stopped by Medical Supplies. There, she picked up a sterilised plastic package and opened it.

The gloves inside were called restraining gloves; the palms and fingers were covered with an alternating series of razored tips and sharp points, like tiny blades and thorns. They were designed for holding particularly slimy specimens, or anything else that might tend to slide out of one's grasp. They were black rubber and quite heavy, but stretched so that even Esselle's rather small-boned hand could wear them.

Esselle laid them carefully together palm to palm, folded them, and put them in her pocket.

A few minutes later, she tapped at Nyder's door. And waited. Then tapped again, and said, "Security Liaison requesting admittance."

The door opened and she stepped inside.


	7. Punishment {GSS}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a GSS {gratuitous sex scene}. Specific knowledge of the events in this chapter is not integral to the plot of the main story. If you are not interested in Esselle/Nyder, forced sexual contact, needle play or blood play, please skip ahead to the next chapter.

The room was dark except for the bright light over the desk, which showed the usual piles of neatly arranged papers. Nyder sat behind the desk, expressionless, only his face visible.

The door closed behind Esselle. She leaned forward and spread her fingers at the desk, staring into Nyder's eyes.

She spoke quietly. "We can either do this here or I can call six Daughters to drag you into the main laboratory and do it there on the floor. At this hour it should be empty, but we might draw an audience anyway. And I am here to punish, not to humiliate."

Nyder said nothing; he leaned back in his chair, still staring at her. The light reflected in his glasses was the brightest thing about his person as he said, also quietly, "Go on."

Esselle cocked her head to one side. "You loathe me, Commander. Loathe my presence, my existence."

Nyder's face did not show any reaction.

Her eyes slitted in thought. "And you hate to be touched. Don't you?"

He looked down at the desk; the reflections in his glasses rolled up and away. He was a dark silent figure sitting there, apparently impervious to Esselle's words.

She reached into her pocket. "Take your boots off."

Nyder did not visibly flinch, but in his mind he pictured broken toes, bastinado, flaying - or worse. The Kaled military was exceedingly flexible in terms of what punishments could be doled out on the order of a superior. He leaned forward into the light, hissing, "You were sent to punish, not maim!"

He was met by a killing snarl: eyes and mouth wide, teeth bared, a blast of silent menace framed by the black fall of her hair. Then Esselle closed her mouth, and raised her hand, palm out.

"I swear by my title, not to cause you permanent harm, nor to cause any harm that will impede you in your duties." She waited for his reaction.

Nyder thought: an oath sworn by her title was serious. If she broke it, she would leave her position. And to have her leave it, due to her own actions; that would be a knife in her sharper than any real steel.

He pushed back from the desk and, mouth pursed in disapproval, removed his boots.

"Socks too," Esselle requested, coming to stand by him. He peeled them off as well, carefully placed them inside his boots, then pressed his feet flat to the floor and crossed his arms, daring her to go on.

With a swing of her arm she spun his chair to face her. She knelt and grabbed his left foot, squeezing the ankle in a stinging grasp. He instinctively tried to pull away and she squeezed harder, and snarled, "Hold."

He froze.

"You cannot move quickly while I have my hands on you. You must not jerk away or you will be hurt. You must not tense or the resistance of your flesh will be too tight. You must simply sit there and – relax. And let me touch you."

Esselle smiled up at him, a sincerely happy smile. She picked up his foot and with both gloved hands started kneading his sole, rubbing firmly back and forth, dragging the sharp points that coated her gloves across his skin, across the heel, up along the arch, then softer along the bottom of his toes.

It was scratchy and tickly and supremely irritating, and it made Nyder want to scream. He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction though. He dug his fingers into his arms and stared blindly at the top of her head, suppressing his reflexive desire to kick her away. Waiting to see what she would do next, what humiliating little tricks she would play.

But she just kept massaging his foot, rubbing her gloved palm back and forth across his skin – and then she scooped up his other foot, and started to work on both of them at once.

Nyder's knees ached; it felt like every muscle in his calves and feet were clutched tight in rebellion against this touch. Sharp pains stabbed at the arches of his soles, but he realised that it was not her doing that, it was him. Consciously, deliberately, he tried to relax just his feet – and the pain stopped. The tiny points, rather than grinding into stiff muscle, slid against his relaxed flesh.

He clenched his teeth. It was...damn her, what was she doing to him…nothing had changed, but the scratching caress was no longer tormenting him. Instead, it felt…

Her hands were sweeping over the backs of his calves now, and the long muscles of his legs quivered and went slack at her touch. Her fingers moved in little circles up along his legs, pressing lighter over the areas where scars had laid their white marks, drawing the hundreds of sharp points through his fine black body hair. They found the back of his knees and plucked at his tendons, lightly, so lightly, so gently.

It felt wonderful. Nyder caught his head starting to loll and brought it erect with a snap that make his neck ache. He was not going to…to relax for this woman! His hands trembled, then flew down and gripped the sides of the chair; they could both hear the frame of it creak under the force of his grasp.

She looked up at him and he was caught in her intent, hungry gaze for a moment: a moment too long. She was standing, her hand knifing under the edge of his uniform jacket and popping it open (and how she managed that with both hands in rubber gloves he never figured out), she grasped the lapels between her knuckles and pulled up, back and down in one movement.

Now they were face to face: Nyder's arms were trapped, confined in the jacket that was now tented over the back of the chair. He could escape, with effort and loss of dignity, but - he kept reminding himself, Davros ordered this, Davros gave her permission to do this, Davros wants this. Who knew what sort of abominable humiliation she might come up with if he fought her off.

Esselle's knees were outside of his legs, on the chair seat. She touched her fingertips to his jaw line and slowly, slowly dragged them down. He felt the tiny sharp points grazing his neck, vividly imagined what would happen if she dug in her hands now, pictured his lifeblood loosed over her face and hands through a hundred slices.

Instead, the fingers stopped at the edge of his black under shirt, and circled around his neck. He stared into her eyes as her fingers found the back of his neck, right where that tense ache was centred, and started moving again in those tiny firm circles, rubbing, stroking his scalp, stroking the tendons of his neck, rubbing up and behind his ears, and then down to his collar and then returning. Her thumbs swept back from the base of his ears to the small of his neck, again and again, and each time felt better than the last. She cupped the entire back of his head in her two hands, and squeezed, very soft, just right.

Her hands slid up and down his neck and started kneading at his shoulders, and he swore he could feel the tension of the day's work run out of them and down through his fingertips into the floor. Without his noticing it, his hands were hanging slack at his side; he closed his eyes, revelling in the sensations, ignoring the tiny popping noises as her barbed touch had its way with the thin cloth of his under shirt.

"Open your eyes," she ordered.

He kept them closed.

Her hands moved from his shoulders and were suddenly over his face, up his face, under his glasses, until he could feel those evil little points covering him from chin to forehead. The hands moved a little to the sides; he felt the points slide over him, and shivered. He opened his eyes, and could feel his eyelashes flick across the material of the gloves.

Esselle went back to work along his shoulders and spilling across now to his chest muscles, and he studied her, trying to decide what the expression she was wearing meant. It was pleasure, no doubt about it, but was it pleasure at humiliating him? Pleasure at seeing the scars and marks that war had left on his body?

Her pupils were large and intent as she stared into his eyes. One palm was stroking his brow in long strokes while the other hand did something – twisted his collar. What?

She grabbed with both hands and ripped his shirt open; it parted along the frays at his shoulders and throat, and split open nearly to his navel. Her face brightened with excitement at this baring of him.

He kept his eyes open, somehow, as her hands returned, sweeping in broad circles over his chest and ribs, a single smooth rippling path across his shoulders and down and over his chest and around his ribs and back and over and across his back, again and again, her hands moving his body like a puppet, and then running over just his shoulders, around and around and around, then up and down the front of his chest, lower and lower. The shreds of the shirt were discarded, as her hands continued wending their way down his torso.

He did not look down. The muscles of his stomach shook with tension, even under her touch. If she looked down, between her knees where his legs were held helpless, she was sure to see that his uniform was becoming distinctly tight across his lap. It hurt; he wanted to touch, to adjust himself, but he didn't dare.

She pressed both hands flat across his chest and leaned close; her weight was not on him fully, but still the hard pressure was the most pain he had felt so far. He tried to relax again…Davros orders this…

And then he thought: she wants me to fight her. Fight back. This is all just a trick to make me lash out - and if I do that, then she will have authority to really abuse me, for resisting. If I give up, if I give in…she won't get her satisfaction. She will lose this little game.

Esselle whispered, "Now remember, this is punishment. But I wouldn't want to go…too far. So if there's something that you absolutely, positively cannot stand for me to do to you…now is the time to tell me."

"Don't…"

She waited, eyes alight. He closed his eyes, and breathed out his surrender.

"Don't…stop. Please…"

She growled and he shivered all over; her hands swept up and into his armpits, pulling at his jacket, and he raised his arms, limply, like a doll, letting her take the jacket off and drop it on the floor, along with the rags of his shirt. Above the waist he was dressed only his gloves and a thin sheen of sweat. He wanted, he needed, for her hands to move down, to strip him and leave him exposed to her. But instead, she pushed to keep his arms over his head, and those wonderful, terrible, deft little fingers started to fondle the tender skin under his arms, along his sides, raking him with those hundreds of sharp needle points.

He was panting, though he did not know it: having her fingers and her attention on him, it was intoxicating, and wonderful to think that soon her hands would descend.

And now her hands did descend, while he stayed frozen in the chair, back arched, arms stretched out loose from his shoulders, crucified at her touch. He felt her touch the waistband of his uniform and his hips rose to her. He couldn't stop himself. His eyes rolled open, and he gazed down as she rose and her hands worked their magic again, leaving his jodhpurs in a pool around his ankles.

He was completely naked to her, and the nakedest part of him was there, flushed and full with passion. She stroked him very gently, with just one finger, and his flesh leaped to her touch. Her eyes intent on his body, she stripped the glove off one of her hands and then laid both of them, barbed and bare, on his intimate flesh.

She began her final assault on him; and the combination of naked hand and spiky fingers, warm skin and cold rubber, all cupping him, squeezing him, stroking him, sliding up and down his flesh, drawing him on and out brought him to the peak in a matter of instants. He thrust, helpless, caged in her hands but released, soaring...

He slumped back into the chair, limp under her touch as she wiped him off.

When he opened his eyes, Esselle was standing over him, cool and collected, carefully folding both rubber gloves and putting them in her pocket. She looked down along him, lying bare before her, and sighed. "Ah. I did draw blood after all."

He looked down too, but her head was in the way, in his lap now; he felt the velvet of her tongue on him, the tickling of her hair dragging along his thighs, and when she rose to face him, their noses nearly touching, he could smell what must be his own blood on her breath.

She continued, "Commander. You are punished." She straightened and reached into her pocket, and put two clear capsules on the desk. "That's amnesia, two-hour dose. Do you want it?"

Nyder looked up at her, baffled. He knew the effects of the amnesia drug that the Reflectionists made. If he took the drug, he would forget everything that had happened in the last two hours. But why would she offer this; what purpose would the punishment serve if he couldn't remember it? He intended to snap out No! but it came out as a question instead. "No?"

She picked up the capsules and put them back in her pocket. Without another word or the slightest sign of emotion, she left.

While his breathing slowly returned to normal, he examined himself; there was a stippling of blood from his movements during that overwhelming last swell of lust, but no more. Not enough for him to use it as an excuse for dismissal. Not even as much as (he swallowed and completed the thought) as a tattoo would draw.

Suddenly he snorted through his nose with frustration: he should have made her take the amnesia pills, and then she would have forgotten punishing him. But he hadn't realised that in time. And besides, in that situation she might have come back and punished him again.

He got up and went into his tiny private washroom, and did not bother turning on the lights. He stood in the shower, the water hot and stinging, lathering and scrubbing himself mechanically, for far too long in the steamy dark.

He'd surrendered. He hadn't fought back. He had taken his punishment.

So he'd defeated her.

Hadn't he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really, really wanted to get an Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS joke in here, but I couldn't manage it. And now that I think about it, I don't know if it would have been a boots joke, or a wig joke.


	8. Decisions

Davros' office had been repaired overnight - for the most part. The workers had to move in the furniture around the room's unnatural new centrepiece.

The Dalek had come here, and was currently connected by Davros by two thin metal cables that ran from the top of its dome to under his hair. Davros had a full neural array that he had used to pour his old personality and mind into this new body: he could also use it to communicate directly to the Dalek. He sat in his chair, barely seeming to breathe. Sometimes his eyes rolled under his lids, although they did not open; sometimes the Dalek's speech lights flickered, although it made no sound.

Once the new desk was installed, the workers refilled it with Davros' papers, and left with considerable alacrity. Nobody wanted to be there when Davros roused himself. He was likely to be full of breathtaking new ideas that would require extra work to be brought to life - work that he would not hesitate to assign on the spot to whoever was within his line of sight. And the Dalek, well, better just not to be there with it at all.

* * *

Leela woke up instantly when someone entered her cell. She relaxed, minutely, when she saw that it was only Esselle. The other woman sat down on the bunk across from her, and said, "Breakfast?" She proffered a plate full of greenish oval things.

"Thank you," said Leela. The green things were not as nice as the ravioli, but they were better than the pills that tasted like metal and poison. They weren't quite fruit, though: there were no seeds, and they did not taste like meat. Leaves?

"They're algae - small ocean plants, cooked together," said Esselle. "In case you were wondering. Now, what shall we do with you?"

"I should be with the Doctor," said Leela, after swallowing to clear her throat.

"Ah, well." Esselle touched her hands together in a curiously formal gesture, fingertip to fingertip. "I have a dilemma there. Davros has made it clear that he, Nyder and the Doctor are going to be working together today. But I fear you would find their work boring. Perhaps you could help me with a little task?"

"What sort of task?" asked Leela.

"When we found the Doctor, he was being held captive by followers of the God of War."

"Does the God have a name?" She knew from her travels with the Doctor that gods were very important in most places and times.

"No, actually," Esselle's mouth twisted in something that was not a smile. "Every generation is supposed to have one who is called by the God. He becomes the God's avatar, and leads His followers into combat as an unstoppable force. Alas, the avatar often doesn't survive these combats. No one has been recognised as the avatar of this generation, so the followers are looking. When they find the avatar, or rather when someone is filled with the power of the God and reveals himself, the God will be named for him: Smett, God of War, say."

"Or Nyder, God of War, maybe."

Esselle visibly shivered. "There's a nasty thought. Anyway, one of the followers is here. I was thinking that you and I could while away a pleasant few hours putting him to the torture, making him talk."

"He has done me no harm," said Leela. "Why should I torture him?"

Esselle gave one of her rare smiles. "What a refreshing attitude." She looked wistful for a moment. "One does tend to pick up the most ghastly habits from the people here. Well, I have some questions I have to ask him. You can come along and watch, or stay here and do nothing."

Leela considered. There was always the chance she could slip away and go find the Doctor - or K-9. And if these god-followers had been holding the Doctor, they might have hurt him, in which case they deserved torture. So she nodded assent, and they rose and left the cell together.

* * *

In the next cell over, the Doctor was lying on his bunk, apparently asleep. Behind his closed eyes, his mind was working furiously. He had never been on a planet where the Reflectionists were a majority: he still tended to think of them as something like tourists, a handful of them appearing on a planet, staying around long enough to see the sights, and then Launching to another one. But after his last visit to Skaro, when the war had been broken so spectacularly (and with very little help from him, to be honest), he had studied them.

The libraries on half a hundred worlds had shown him that the Reflectionists were far more deeply entrenched in inhabited space and time than he - or possibly anyone - had ever realised. The tracks of their presence were everywhere: certain phrases and games that cropped up again and again. And there were hints, strange suggestions of what might happen on a world where they had sufficient numbers to perform certain tasks, summon certain energies.

Deep in his thoughts, the Doctor remained still with his eyes closed, even at the sound of the door opening and booted footsteps clicking on the floor. A kick to the head of the bunk finally convinced him to rouse.

When he opened his eyes, Commander Nyder stepped back and stood with his back to the wall, his gun out and aimed steadily at the Doctor's torso. The Doctor knew from long experience that braggarts tried to frighten you by pointing a gun at your face, while the methodical killers went for the centre of mass.

He swung his feet off the bunk and sat up, but decided not to stand; he was over a head taller than Nyder, and saw no reason for either of them to get a crick in the neck. "Any chance of some breakfast?" he enquired, flashing a grin.

Nyder tossed two small plastic bags to the Doctor. He caught them fumblingly; one held a fistful of food pills, the other was a bag of water, complete with integrated straw.

"Ah, hm. The finest in Skaro cuisine, I suppose." The Doctor dithered on handling the two items, and finally ended up with the open bag of pills beside him, and the water bag in one hand. He stuck the straw into the corner of his mouth, and sucked dolefully. He supposed from a security point of view it was the optimal way to feed prisoners: no plates to throw, no utensils to turn into weapons.

Nyder's face was impassive as the Doctor ate a few food pills, grimaced, and then washed them down with more water. The prisoner finally looked up and asked, "May I ask you a personal question, Commander?"

Nyder actually looked startled - for a moment. "Go on," was his reply.

"How do you feel about the Reflectionists? About the way they've changed your society, your planet even?" The Doctor was intensely curious about Nyder's answer, and it showed as he leaned forward, his breakfast ignored.

Nyder's face showed no feeling whatsoever, but his voice was a bit tense as he answered. "They ended the war."

"And?"

Nyder looked aside for a split second, then back at the Doctor. "They have reinforced Davros' power. They have rolled back certain wartime - restrictions, regulations, but they have not let our society fall into chaos. They have transitioned the military personnel into civilian roles with a minimum of executions. They even held open elections."

"How did those go?"

Nyder looked wryly at the Doctor. "There have been too many times in the past where the Kaled government encouraged some activity, say public discourse or art restoration, and used this as a method to sweep up and dispose of elements considered undesirable. Voter turnout was less than two percent, and it was decided to hold the current political system static for five years, and then try again."

The Doctor swallowed a last food pill, imagining a population so terrified of its own government that it could not even bring itself to vote for or against it. Like a wild animal beaten into submission, too afraid to leave its opened cage and free itself. Almost absently, he drained the water bag and put it aside.

"They are rather - reticent on sharing certain things, though. These aliens have insinuated themselves into everything, and changed things. I do not like change." Nyder's expression darkened. "But they consulted with Davros at every turn, accepted and even reinforced his leadership over the Kaled people. And where Davros leads, I will follow." His tone made it clear that this last statement was an absolute.

Nyder stepped away from the wall. "We are going to Davros' office, now." Without warning, Nyder kicked the seated prisoner hard in the diaphragm. The toe of his boot sank deep, and the Doctor bent over, wheezing, clutching at himself and trying to simultaneously get his breath back and keep his breakfast from leaving. Nyder looked on with an air of satisfaction, his weapon still trained on the prisoner.

When he finally could breathe, and looked up Nyder with fury in his eyes, the Commander said mildly, "Do not ask me any more personal questions, Doctor." His eyes narrowed, and he almost smiled. "For your sake."

* * *

The Interrogation Centre was another room full of machines Leela did not understand; but Esselle pulled out drawers revealing rows and rows of gleaming metal equipment, most of it with sharp points or razored edges, meant to wound. Leela helped Esselle lay out some of the nastier looking devices out on clever wheeled tables that she arranged around a metal chair that had more machines affixed to it.

"Torture," said Esselle, minutely adjusting the position of one of the tables, "is not just pain: it is the fear of pain." She stepped back and frowned at the arrangement.

"Should we put a table on the other side?" asked Leela; right now the torture instruments were all arranged in an arc to the left side of the chair.

"The guards will have to bring him in and bind him," said Esselle, "and I don't want any of the tables to be knocked over if he fights. We'd be forever finding all the little needles on the floor."

When the guards finally brought in the prisoner, he was a bony fellow, all arms and legs and big scared eyes. Very frightened eyes, and even more frightened when he saw Esselle waiting for him. The guards fastened him down in the metal chair, and bound the machines on straps around his chest and legs and head. With a gesture, Esselle sent them away. Then she stepped close to the prisoner and stared at him, and then down to a folder in her hand.

"Lonrie 44210917," she said, reading from the folder. "A Kaled deserter - deserted from this very Bunker. Imagine that!" She looked at Leela, who was amusing herself with the instruments. Lonrie's eyes went wider, at the sight of the tall leather-clad woman fiddling with the torture equipment like toys.

"I'm not a deserter," said Lonrie. "I resigned my commission, and Nyder refused to accept it!"

"Do you have any proof of that?" Esselle said.

"His word against mine - what do you think?" He spat, as though trying to use his anger to keep back his fear - and not entirely succeeding. "I had to run. You know why." His jaw was set now, in anticipation of pain.

"I do know. I think I believe you - not that this excuses you joining the followers of the God of War." Esselle's voice was cool.

"What is this one for?" Leela interrupted, holding up something with a sharp curved part attached, like the thing the Doctor called a spoon.

"Eyeballs," said Esselle. "Or anything else spherical you want to-"

"I have given my life to the God of War," said the prisoner in the strained voice of a man consciously choking out his last words. "I die in His service, and that is a death of honour!" The fear was outweighing the anger at this point.

Esselle looked at the console behind her, where lights flickered in some pattern Leela could not understand. "The machine says that is true - or at least that you believe it is true." She sighed. "That's the problem with lie detectors - they will always tell you what the other person believes is true, not what is true in reality."

Lonrie began to chant, but his voice was so faint that they could barely make out all the words. "The God will bring us blood, the God will…will bring us…"

"Shhh," hushed Esselle, finger to her own lips. Then she picked something up off the console. It was a short shiny rod with two bumps at one end and a button on the other, and Lonrie reacted to it as though it was some venomous animal. He strained against his bonds until they could hear his tendons creak. "No!" he screamed.

"Do you know what this is?" Esselle asked, holding the rod out.

"No! I mean, yes, it's a flexprod, please, it hurts, the God save me it hurts, you can't imagine how much." Lonrie was crying now, drowning in terror. "Please don't use that on me, please…"

"I wonder though, if this flexprod is fully charged. Shall we see?" She put the rod down and rolled up her right sleeve. The arm underneath was marked: the skin mottled, seeming somehow too loose and crinkled. Leela thought that Esselle must have been burned on that arm, and badly, a long time ago. Without another word, she picked up the rod, pressed the end against her right bicep, and hit the button.

She convulsed, her whole body twisting as though to shield that arm. Pain screamed from her movement, but she did not make a sound. Slowly, jerkily, she straightened herself, and laid the flexprod on the console behind her. Her right arm was shuddering, muscles twitching as she rolled the sleeve carefully back down. "Definitely…fully charged," she said in a trembling voice.

Lonrie and Leela were both staring at her, open-mouthed.

She put her hands behind her back, and stood at attention. "I know it hurts, Lonrie. And I don't want to hurt you. I need to know the answer to my questions right now. And after you answer, truthfully, I will remand you over to Dome custody for interrogation."

"They're just as bad!" squeaked the prisoner.

"Not as bad as Nyder." She leaned over, staring into Lonrie's eyes. "Or me. At the Dome you'll have a chance to plead your case. They have lie detectors as well, although I think Davros would squash any charges you tried to press against Nyder. At worst they'll exile you, throw you out of the Dome - which is where you have been anyway. But if Nyder gets a chance to interrogate you here in the Bunker, we'll be sweeping you out of this room with a rake. A narrow toothed rake, at that."

Lonrie swallowed. "What are the questions?" he asked in a very small voice.

Esselle turned her head, so that she could watch the console and the prisoner at once. "Have you or anyone you know tried to assassinate Davros?"

"No!" Lonrie said indignantly. "Never!"

"Do you or anyone you know have a way of accessing the Bunker in secret?"

"No." And at Esselle's doubtful expression, "Really, no!"

Esselle reached into the folder and pulled out a picture: a man, young, wearing a fancy blue uniform. "Have you or anyone you know seen this man, either outside the Dome or at a meeting of the God of War?"

Lonrie stared at the picture, and then said all in a rush, straining forward, "No! No, I've never seen him, I don't know him!" He smiled in terror.

Esselle turned and looked carefully at the console. "All true."

Lonrie fell back into his bonds, dripping with sweat. Esselle went to the communicator and asked for the guards to come take Lonrie to the Dome.

"You're really going to let me go?" he asked, in a broken voice.

"No, I'm really going to send you to the Dome for punishment," she said. "You don't need punishment, in my opinion: you need healing. But as long as you hate everything, as long as you long for war and destruction more than healing and rebuilding, we can't help you. We hope that you will come back to us someday." She looked sympathetically down on Lonrie, and he looked up at her and shuddered.

"Who is this man?" said Leela, looking at the picture.

"General Ferr. He holds a Red pass, that would let him go anywhere in the Bunker. He's a solitary type, likes to go for lots of long overland trips, even out to the islands. And we can't find him. Or his pass."

"So if someone had this Red pass-" said Leela excitedly.

"They could get into the Bunker. But that doesn't explain what happened to Projectionist," said Esselle, frowning. "And would you please put that scalpel back, Leela, it is too sharp to carry without a sheath."

Leela looked at her with astonishment. "How did you know?" She had been certain that Esselle had her back turned when she picked up the weapon and hid it.

Esselle ran her fingers through her hair, showing the tiny metal plates set into her skull. "These are sensitive to light. I can see out of them."

"Very strong magic," said Leela, impressed. Then she took the small knife that Esselle had called a scalpel out of her clothes and put it back on the tray. No point in arguing, the guards were everywhere.

* * *

The Doctor had finally arrived at Davros' office, with Nyder behind him like a black shadow. Inside the office was the person, or rather thing, he least wanted to see. A Dalek. It was connected to Davros' neural array by gleaming cables. The image of a spider crouched in some metal web came to him - and he wondered if that spider's name was Davros, or Prime.

"Nyder," said Davros, even though his eyes were closed. Either he had recognised the other man's footsteps, or possibly he was seeing through the Dalek's senses. "You are well, I trust."

"I am fit to report for duty, Davros," said Nyder; there was a certain degree of tension in his neck that suggested he wanted the conversation on why he might not be fit for duty this morning to go no further. He took a thick sheaf of papers and envelopes from under his arm and laid it on Davros' new desk.

"The morning mail?" asked the Doctor with a bright smile.

Nyder decided to answer the prisoner's question. "Writing to the Supreme Commander is an interesting tool to promote literacy. I evaluate it every morning here, looking for-"

Davros interrupted. "The Daleks sent a representative last night. I have been sharing its computational skills, seeking its analysis on how to end these attacks on my life." He opened his eyes, and casually pulled the cables free from the Dalek, coiling them around and around in his hands.

The Dalek turned its dome and eyestalk to look at the Doctor and droned, "The logical action is to exterminate the Doctor and his accomplices. If the attacks stop, then he was the perpetrator."

The Doctor shivered a bit inside, to hear the voice of his oldest enemy again. "Curious that you should know about the attacks so quickly," he riposted.

"We were consulted as to any intruders moving about on the surface of Skaro. Our sensory instruments are of superior quality. We detected nothing unusual." The Dalek turned back to Davros, and then addressed the room in general. "Davros is not safe in the Bunker. He should come to the Dalek city. We could decontaminate a section for his use. The Daleks would give Davros laboratory space, resources, all that he needs to continue his work."

"But would I be safe from the Reflectionists there?" Davros leaned back in his chair. "There is certainly no place safe from them here. They have dug themselves in at this Bunker - literally. They have interwoven themselves into every aspect of Kaled life in the Dome."

"Strange," said the Doctor. "I'd think that xenophobia, fear of aliens, would lead to more friction between your two - groups." Species was the word he did not use; they were the same species, physically. "Your government had been drilling hatred of the enemy, of the Thals, into the Kaled people for centuries."

Davros raised his chin. "The Reflectionists' actions in ending the Thousand Years War are enough to make them quite acceptable to the normal Kaleds." His tone indicated that he certainly did not count himself as one of those normal ones.

"The aliens are not in our city," said the Dalek.

"Are you sure?" asked the Doctor. "Can you be certain that one of them has not copied itself off into a Dalek casing, and rolled in there to infiltrate you?"

"We scrutinise ourselves with perfect precision, at precise intervals. No Dalek is a Reflectionist. We have made use of their personality editing techniques, studied their philosophies, but we are not them."

Davros stood and started to pace back and forth: pacing must be quite a pleasure for someone who has regained their legs, thought the Doctor. "The explosion in my office could have been a normal assassination attempt; I've survived enough of those. But the distortion and destruction of Projectionist - that could only have been done by another one of her. Unless it points to some underlying defect in the neural arrays themselves, or some overwhelming of her personality by an outside source…but who?"

"Could you do it, Davros?" asked the Doctor.

"What?"

"You have a full neural array - could you impose yourself onto a Reflectionist body, and overwrite the mind that was already there?"

"No." Davros stopped and stared off into the distance. "I thought I could, once. I did some initial experiments."

"And?"

"I ordered one of them to bring me a neural amplifier, and wired myself to the one who brought it. I opened my mind and I saw - her. Saw all of her mind, at once. It was tremendous!" Davros' hands moved as though to spread wide, and then clenched into fists; his face was a strange mix of joy and frustration. "It went on forever, great spires of knowledge, abysses of thought and feeling, rivers of emotion too great to comprehend. And it was all so organised, so controlled, so perfect! She tried to hold the connection open for me, but I was lost. I had no idea of how to begin to take in everything that she was. And then as she turned her mind away, ended the experiment, her mind became - a mirror."

Davros paced, his legs moving mechanically to send him up and down the room. "And I saw - myself, my mind, as she saw it. Something tiny and tangled and deformed. Mutated. And so tiny! I shone bright, very bright, but…there was so little to me, compared to her." He stopped and sighed. "There is so much more for me to learn, about everything. About the universe."

"And yourself," said the Doctor quietly.

"And myself." Davros returned to his chair and sat. "And I will not have that time if I am splattered all over the Bunker by some assassin!"

Nyder winced. The Doctor asked, not casually, "So, what's your plan?"

"Davros is not safe here," said the Dalek.

"Nobody asked you!" snapped the Doctor, and the Dalek rotated its dome to stare at the intruder.

"He would be safe in the Dalek city. Safe from the Reflectionists. Safe from the Doctor," it continued.

"I am not inclined to move my base of operations from the Bunker - not that the Daleks' offer is not generous." Davros interlaced his fingers before him. "It would be more sensible to move those things that make me unsafe - away from what is mine. The Bunker. The Dome. Kaled territory, those are mine. And the things that make me unsafe…" His voice trailed off, and he stared into space, not seeing the room in front of him.

"Does this mean Leela and I could go now?" asked the Doctor hopefully. It seemed like a win-win scenario: he and Leela could go find K-9 and leave Skaro, Davros would feel safe again.

"It means that I must remove all threats to my person. And what I mean by all threats should be obvious to a man of your intellect, Doctor. The Kaleds must separate themselves from these Reflectionists. We must expel them from the Dome, and from their facility under the Bunker. Skaro is large, they will find another home. Far from us."

"Don't you think that's rather an overreaction, Davros?" said the Doctor, aghast. "After everything they've done for you, you can't just throw them away!" He took a step forward - and halted, at the touch of Nyder's weapon in the small of his back.

"I can." Davros reached out and laid his hand on the Dalek's casing, softly. And in that touch the Doctor saw Skaro in flames.


	9. Distortions

Davros' voice was a hypnotic rhythm. "The Reflectionists will leave. These alien infiltrators. They have given the Kaled people new life, and now it is time that they leave us to live it as we please. They all wear the same face; they all have the cranial implants. It will be easy enough to strip them out of the general population. This planet has large uninhabited sections, plus the islands. They will have plenty of places to settle, far away from us. And if they resist, they will be destroyed."

Nyder's eyes were alight with approval; the flames of a burning Skaro might be dancing in his head as well.

"It is a pity, almost, that it had to come to this. They have given us great scientific advances - but not enough, not everything!" Davros' hands snapped into fists, his knuckles white. "Always they turn aside from certain questions, always they hesitate to give us everything we demand. How far could we have come if they had given us their knowledge, all of it? But now - now we can strip them of their technology, seize their weapons and their machines. They will no longer be able to reproduce themselves by growing new bodies and transferring their mind-prints. Once they are gone from here, they will be helpless-"

"Oh, give it up, Davros!" exclaimed the Doctor. Ignoring the threat of the weapon at his back, he stepped towards the Kaled leader, whose face was flushed with the excitement of genocide. "Do you really expect an entire species to just crawl away and die on your say-so? Are you really prepared for the sort of chaos that's going to create in your society? If you drive the Reflectionists away, they will just go to the Thals for technology! Do you really want to restart the war between the Kaleds and the Thals?"

"The Thal Reflectionists do not use neural arrays," said the Dalek.

"What?" The Doctor frowned, distracted. "Then how do they make duplicates of their minds in new bodies?"

"The Thals are powerfully telepathic. They have been performing gene therapy, creating telepaths capable of moving entire mind-prints and yet keeping their own patterns separate."

No wonder they managed to survive a thousand years of fighting the Kaleds, thought the Doctor. Telepathic snipers who knew just when to shoot, or maybe precognitives who could see how a battle would turn out. Now he felt a little sorry for the Kaleds.

The Dalek turned back to Davros. "It is your wish, Davros, that we aid you in expelling the Reflectionists, cleansing your population of them?"

"Yes, of course. I made you, I gave you the resources to make more of yourselves, helped you set up your laboratories, your computers. I have been of inestimable aid to the Daleks; surely they will repay my efforts with their own."

The Doctor lowered his head, staring at Davros. "You didn't answer my question, Davros. Do you really want to restart the war between the Kaleds and the Thals?" He stepped forward and slapped his hand hard against the dome of the Dalek's top, making Davros jump. "Do you?" he snapped. Then he looked at the Dalek, wide-eyed, and almost whispered, "Do you?"

"I am willing to do the necessary thing to protect myself." Davros' face was frozen. "We have neutralisers for the Thal amnesia bomb; and a complete analysis of their bioengineered fungus. They are no threat to me."

"Remove yourself," said the Dalek, turning its gun to point at the alien who had dared touch it, and the Doctor withdrew his hand. It focussed on Davros. "We are to exile all the Reflectionists? Even the Prime? Even your gene match, Security Liaison?"

"She is unique, true," said Davros musingly. "I wonder…we will have the Reflectionist technology, I would be able to create another physical body to use for organ grafts. Commander Nyder." He hesitated as though deciding how to frame the question. "Is Esselle still alive and in good health?"

"Yes, Davros," Nyder replied.

"But she did punish you."

"Yes," said Nyder. His voice was flat as death.

"What do you think you're playing at with her, Commander?" The Doctor turned away from the problem of Davros and stared down at Nyder. "She's a Reflectionist; she's probably got ten thousand years of linear memory in her head. Do you really think your games are going to have the slightest effect on a personality that old?" He leaned closer, and said softly, "Do you really think there is anything you could do that could truly hurt her?"

Nyder looked back at the Doctor, narrow-eyed. "I persevere," he said, and a ghost of a smile played around his lips.

The Doctor stepped away, kicking his scarf out ahead of him in a fit of pique, and then turned back. 'There's an old Reflectionist saying: 'We have found that the universe is bleak and cold and eternally numb, and only such sensation as we can draw from it makes it real and worth living in.' Anything you do to her - anything! - she'll take as just another sensation, positive reinforcement. She is cherishing every drop of your disdain, storing it away like fine wine to be aged. Five hundred years from now her memories of you might be shared among aliens on some distant planet. They'll sit around and sip tea or acid or liquid helium, and say, remember that Nyder chap, on Skaro? Cold he was. A bitter little man, eternally prying and spying. A matchless example of the type, all around." The Doctor smiled at Nyder's frozen features.

"I shall see to it that her memories die with her, then," said Nyder, and watched with pleasure as the Doctor's smile vanished. The memories of Projectionist's destruction were still fresh in both their minds. "If we are to expel the aliens, Davros, I should perhaps start with this one?" Nyder's expression suggested that he was considering expelling the Doctor out the main entrance, one piece at a time.

"No, I need you to coordinate the initial cleaning of the Bunker, and staging for penetration of their underground facilities and the Dome. Later, you can do with him as you wish."

The Doctor and Nyder exchanged glances: unpleasantly anxious from one, coldly gloating from the other.

"Dalek unit, I will require more of you to report for duty. Enough to carry out my orders," ordered Davros.

"Understood."

Davros stood and went to one of the walls of his office; he kept talking as he pried loose a panel. "You can plug yourself directly into the Bunker communications network from here, and send a message to Dal." He went to the next wall panel, and loosened it; behind it was a bewildering tangle of M-class cables. "The Reflectionists have woven their covert communications system throughout the Bunker and the Dome; however it just so happens that all of the main networks have a connection through this wall section." He reached inside the wall panel, and pulled out a rough-looking metal box, clearly assembled by hand, with bright beads of solder showing around the edges. "So, if I patch this device into their network, and turn it on, I can jam their mind-to-mind communications." Davros set himself to hooking slim metal probes to his box, and then sinking them into the various M-class cables.

The Dalek had approached the electronic circuitry panel, and raised its sucker-tipped arm; the sucker split in two, and an elaborate metal multi-connector of some sort appeared. Connecting itself to the system, it was motionless, its speech lights flickering at a blinding pace. It turned its eyestalk to Davros just as he finished connecting his jamming apparatus to one last strand.

"I have contacted Dal," droned the Dalek. "We have consulted one to another. We are ready to obey your commands."

"Are you, now," Davros said, an evil smile playing about his lips. "Then prepare yourselves. Bring out your forces; position them around the Bunker and the Dome. Prepare to interrupt the normal communication channels between the Bunker and the Dome. I will give the signal."

He clenched the cables still running through his fist as though he clutched a helpless throat. "Soon."

* * *

Gharman was pacing; it was a part of his work habit, to walk round and round the Bunker in a figure-8 pattern, in order to put his thoughts in order. He was preparing a report to be transmitted via his neural relay directly into the computer, and from there sent to the Dome for Kavell. He had some very interesting test results to report, regarding Kavell's plan to tailor strains of the Thal fungus to be element specific: you could set the stuff loose in a strata full of metallic ore, and the fungus would actually dissolve the particles of the desired elements, transport them to the surface, and extrude them in great fungal spirals to be harvested.

But to transmit the report concisely and cleanly, Gharman needed to focus all of his attention on it. If his mind wandered during the process, what would show up on his screen would be gibberish. Worse, the wandering might get sent to the Dome as well, where the various text filters would kick it back for editing (he remembered how embarrassed he had been, when a brief musing about one of the Laboratory Assistant's posterior came back flagged as 'not relevant').

He thought that he was almost ready, the data lined up in his mind in smooth rows and columns, ready to be sent into the computer. Ahead of him, he heard someone talking. It sounded like some of the Security men, but they should be on patrol, not talking. Gharman's rubber-soled shoes were silent as he stopped and listened.

It was Jula from the sound of his voice, hissing, "But Davros orders it!"

"Then he's firing blanks out of both ears," said another man. "Expel the Reflectionists from here and from the Dome? It's impossible, there's too many of them. They've built a huge facility right under our feet, we all know that, and I'm not going down there to hunt them in the dark!"

Gharman swallowed, and listened even more intently.

"But what can we do?" whined Jula.

"They're cutting off all communication to the Dome in a few minutes, and sweeping through the laboratories with Daleks - and there's more Daleks on their way, to surround the Dome. The Bunker radio room is already sealed off. There isn't any way we can warn them!"

Gharman turned, silently, and moved back to the main laboratory. Without rushing, he sat down smoothly at his desk, scooped up his connection cable, and touched it to the relay on his cheekbone. With care, he turned his head to one side, so that the cable would not be visible from the doorway.

Then he closed his eyes, relaxed, and thought. Very carefully, very specifically, and using phrases that would have his message flagged for review at once. No time to edit: he dumped it all into the Output section, and shoved with all the force his brain could muster.

* * *

**URGENT URGENT URGENT Kavell, read this right now! That prong-biting beetle-brained Muto-loving giddy lunatic Davros is going to attack the Reflectionists! That baby-raping blighted idiot is sending Daleks to the Dome, Kavell, warn them all, tell Ronson, Davros has gone mad and he's taken the Daleks with him, get out of there, get Selaa and run! Where in all the hells is Esselle, how could she let this happen, you've got to seal the Dome, no forget that, the Daleks would just burn their way in, save yourselves, warn the people, warn the Council, grab everything you can and run, run, run! URGENT URGENT URGENT**

* * *

Gharman was still sitting, unmoving, when all the doors of the main laboratory opened at once and the Daleks streamed in. One of them took up position in each doorway; the last moved to the centre of the room and said, "All Laboratory Assistants are to proceed to the Bunker entrance."

The Reflectionists present - there were three of them - looked at the Dalek, as though not understanding. "Is it a surprise?" ventured one of them.

"You will leave the Bunker now or you will be exterminated!"

A second one muttered, "Well, that is a surprise." Without arguing further, the three of them slipped out the main doors and trotted down the corridor, with the Daleks following them. The sound of their retreating footsteps suddenly turned into running, and one of they started to yell, "Eyiyi-"

The searing shriek of a Dalek gun was the result. The yell and the footsteps stopped. There was nothing but deadly silence from outside the room as the door automatically closed, cutting off the sight of the Daleks moving forward, presumably to haul the smoking remains of the Assistants out of the Bunker.

The other scientists immediately rose and went to Gharman, who pulled the thin metal cable from its attachment to the implant in his cheekbone. Gharman looked up at their anxious faces, with fury in his own expression.

"I've warned the Dome," he said. "Davros has apparently decided that the Reflectionists are behind these assassination attempts, and wants to remove them from Kaled territory. All of them."

The room exploded into debate - "He can't do that!" "It's illegal!" "There's too many of them!"

Gharman had to warn these men before they did something foolish. He raised his voice over their hubbub. "You have to protect yourselves. Stay out of the way of those Daleks, warn any Reflectionists you see. Tell them not to set off that alarum cry of theirs, it will only warn the Daleks. I've got to find Esselle, she's the one who knows Davros best - and isn't besotted with his authority the way that Nyder is." Gharman grabbed some current research material off his desk, then rose and left the laboratory.

* * *

"No," said Leela. "But thank you for asking." The other woman had been polite enough with her suggestion, she supposed. Apparently Kaled men were not the only ones interested in tall, beautiful, aggressive women.

Esselle shrugged and took a subtle step backwards. "Just curious."

"What did the Doctor mean, when he said that you were an artificial personality?" Leela asked. She was sitting in the chair behind the console now, absent-mindedly depressing the switches to form a pretty pattern with the lights. "And who are the Reflectionists that made you? Are they Tesh - scientists?"

Esselle smiled. "We are the Reflectionists, called the Daughters of Skaro. Mind-patterns from other stars, who came here to share and learn and then go on. We can choose who we can be: one a leader, one a follower, one kind, one cruel. I was made very carefully, very specifically, that I could work with Davros without him destroying me. He was - very much hurt, when we first came here."

"Hurt how?"

"He was - badly injured in a Thal attack, a long time ago. He was-" But she was interrupted.

Gharman came half-running into the room, and Esselle snapped alert. "What's wrong?"

"Davros," he said grimly. "He's exiling the Reflectionists, all of them, throwing them out. Now."

"Where's the Doctor?" Leela asked, alarmed.

"I don't know, he's not in his cell though. Davros has called in Daleks to be his troops, I don't know how many, dozens or even hundreds."

Esselle looked at Leela, who had risen to her feet. "A rude thing to do with our guests present."

"Will you pay attention!" he suddenly shouted. "Davros is throwing you out, he may well kill you all! He is convinced that the Reflectionists are trying to assassinate him! He's gone completely out of his mind!"

"Davros has an awfully large mind; a lot of travelling to do if he wants to go out of it." She raised one hand to her throat - and Gharman grabbed that hand and forced it down.

"No yelling!" he hissed. "They'll come and kill us both!"

"Possibly." Esselle crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Gharman. "I have a duty to Davros, but also to you. And if they are purging the Reflectionists from here, there may be nobody else to show you this. So - you know the drill - "

Gharman turned his hands up in a shrug. "You tell me what I should not do, which means that I should do it."

"Right. And you should not follow me down into the cell block right now."

Naturally he did follow, and Esselle took Leela to a different cell. Inside the tiny room, she pointed out a specific rivet in the wall and pressed it hard, and a hidden door slid open.

"You should go," Gharman repeated.

"You know that I won't do that, Gharman. Someone else would have made it on foot to the Dome by now. I need to go to Davros. But - this is the way for any of your men to escape, if they have to." Esselle glanced at Leela. "Or you, as well."

"I will not leave the Doctor here," Leela retorted. "He might get hurt!"

"Esselle." Gharman swallowed. "These assassination attempts. Could it be one of you?"

Esselle frowned. "Grossly unlikely, Gharman. That sort of major change to a mindset - it does not happen overnight. It would take years for our basic personality to become so warped that they would seriously consider destroying the greatest intellect on the planet, for any reason. Of course," she brooded a moment, "there might be…I will need to check our records. Discreetly, of course: Laboratory Nineteen is probably under Dalek control, it's the main entrance to our underground facility. I'd be more likely to think that these assassinations were Nyder was trying to promote himself-"

Gharman sucked in his breath through his teeth in a painful hiss.

"Yes?" Esselle looked mournful. "Give me some credit, Gharman. I'm rarely away from the side of one or the other of them. Nyder was not in Davros' office at the time the bomb must have been planted, because he was meeting Ravon and his little Bunker tour group. Nyder is not the assassin."

She sighed, and fidgeted. "I worry about what has happened to Davros' state of mind, though. He has survived many assassination attempts, even ones in his new body, why should this one drive him over the edge?"

"A new body?" Leela asked the Kaled scientist.

Gharman nodded at Esselle. "Davros was old, centuries old. What was left of his body was kept alive only by machines."

"Like an embryo?" said Leela, thinking of the baby Daleks.

"Yes," said Gharman. "A new body was grown for him, in a vat. The body was whole, and the mind was empty; it had literally never thought. And, Davros moved himself into the new body. He has metal implants in his brain, like Esselle and the other Reflectionists."

"That is very strange," said Leela. She cocked her head curiously. "Do you have a picture, of what he was like before?" Pictures were wonderful magic, and she was intrigued at the thought of the Kaled leader as an embryo.

"I will see if I can find one," said Esselle. "I need to check our files, now; see when Davros last had a personality wheel charted, see if he has been keeping up with his medical check-ups. This could just be some organic defect."

"That's not going to help them in the Dome," Gharman said grimly.

"They've got fixed-mount matter disintegrators in the Dome, Gharman; the Daleks will not be blazing their way in there right now. No, they need to hold the Bunker first. And if they are expelling the Reflectionists-" her voice went very soft, "then the Prime herself is in danger." She suddenly shook, her teeth bared in some mental agony. "But I cannot go to her, I cannot protect her! I must protect Davros, even from himself." Deliberately she relaxed herself, let her expression go blank.

"I wish K-9 was here," said Leela. "He could keep an eye on the Doctor, while I fight these Daleks."

Esselle looked at Leela. Her expression suggested that she was admiring her spirit if not her common sense. "You are fond of your little robot, aren't you?"

"He is my friend," Leela said simply.

Esselle looked at the dark gaping doorway. A damp breeze blew out of it, fresh air. "Well, if you went out there and turned left, the Dalek city is about two hours' walking distance, but you can't walk there."

"Why not?"

"Because the poison in the air and the land has not been taken away there. And because of radiation. Let me try to explain." Esselle's eyelids drooped with concentration. "Have you ever  had a sunburn, and felt how hot your skin was afterwards?"

"Yes," said Leela.

"Well, there is an energy in the Dalek city that shines like sunlight, but you cannot see it. And it burns not just your skin, but your muscles and organs and lungs - everything all the way through you. And all your burned skin and flesh radiates the energy of the radiation as well, just like sunburned skin. You would be blind before you got to the city, if you tried to walk there; and dead soon after you arrived."

"Have you seen the city?"

"Yes," Esselle said.

"How could you see it if you go blind going there?"

"There are pills that you can take, that will prevent the radiation from burning you. And protective wear that will shield your eyes and organs from the radiation. But before you can go there, we need to get to the Doctor. For that matter - Gharman, what happened to the Doctor's personal possessions?"

"They're here in my pockets," Gharman said surprisingly. "I was supposed to analyse them, so I grabbed them."

Esselle smiled and gave him a light blow, almost affectionate, on one arm. "Good man."

* * *

K-9 had no awareness of his Mistress thinking of him; he was desperately trying to decode his current situation.

The floppy tentacled things that had let him out of the corridor niche had taken him through a considerable distance of pipes and conduits and through corridors that were deserted. He finally ended up in a room full of machines and glass jars and throbbing noise. A rather radioactive room, as well. And in this room were a lot of the tentacled things.

They were all different, but had some shared features: monocular vision, some asymmetrical assortment of tendrils, greasy or slimy skin. They did not appear to hear; K-9 thought that it must have been the vibration of his voice through the casing, not through the air, that had caused the one on his back to jump away. All the equipment in the room seemed to be devoted to tending the things: feeding them, moving them from jar to jar, exercising them. Were they experimental subjects? Pets? Servants? Probably not servants, they did not seem very useful. They could only move at a creeping pace, at least on land. K-9 had no way to evaluate how they would do in water, or in freefall.

After K-9 entered the room, he and the tentacled creatures spent some time just staring at each other. K-9 nosed about the room a bit, but found that the only door was heavily armoured. He would not be leaving through there, and the path he knew through the conduits would only take him back to his prison spot.

Finally though, one of the creatures dragged itself in front of K-9 and looked at him with its watery brown eye. It made a noise, not words but still a deliberate noise: "Ikki-ikki-ikki."

K-9 was silent, desperately trying to translate the noise. Was it greeting? It did not match any words that he knew, in any of the languages he knew.

"Ikki-ikki-ikki?" the thing squeaked, and crawled to K-9's side. Slowly, tentatively, it crawled up onto the robot, and once there squealed with absolute joy, as though seeing the world from the vantage point of K-9's back was the most wonderful thing in the world.

"Ikki-ikki-ikki!" it squealed, and K-9 imitated the noise. "Ikki-ikki-ikki," he repeated, and moved forward tentatively, not wanting to scare his passenger

The creature hopped with delight, waving its tentacles so hard that K-9 could see them flailing overhead in his peripheral vision. As K-9 started to trundle around the room faster, the creature went into a frenzy of happiness. And when he made a turn to go between two banks of machines, he saw a faithful trail of little tentacle-things following him, waving and squeaking. Some of them latched onto the chain still dragging behind him and let themselves be towed along.

K-9 decided that these were not pets; they were intelligent. They were social creatures. They liked group activities.

They just wanted somebody to play with. Perhaps if he played with them enough, they could show him a way to leave the Dalek city. They certainly seemed to know the tunnels and conduits well enough.

For the moment, K-9 resolved to trundle around and around the room, bearing one or two or three passengers, each one cheeping and wriggling as though this was the high point of its existence.

Even a little robot dog could enjoy feeling appreciated.


	10. Deliberations

The Doctor watched helplessly as Nyder called in the Elite Security men and set them to herding the Reflectionists out of the Bunker. Daleks came sliding in as well, to take their orders and disperse: the Doctor wondered each time one entered if this would be the one that would lash out at the feeble bipeds who dared to give it orders. But they gave every appearance of submitting to Davros' will. The single Dalek who stayed in the room, to guard Davros presumably, was connected to the communication circuits now by multiple cables as well as its own arm.

The first sign that the purge was not going as planned was when one of the guards returned and reported the main Bunker entrance was deserted.

"Where are the men on duty?" Nyder snapped.

"They left with the Reflectionists, sir." He hesitated, and then held out a wad of cloth, marked with the eye-and-lightning logo. "They deserted, sir. Took off their insignia and just - left with them." He looked both dumbfounded and envious.

"Davros, what are your orders? Should the Daleks exterminate any Elite who try to leave?" Nyder almost looked enthused for a moment.

"A waste of their energies, Nyder. We do not need anyone cowardly enough to flee. Let them run," he sneered, gesturing dismissingly with his right hand.

"I am transmitting your order," said the Dalek.

The Doctor looked longingly at the crudely welded box spliced into the Reflectionists' M-class cable junctions. If only he could deactivate that, the Reflectionists could warn the Dome, warn the politicians there, the people, that Davros was starting this obscene revolt. For a revolt it had to be: if there was still a Council, surely they did not bow to Davros to the extent that they would let him expel a large section of their population without warning.

"Just out of curiosity, Davros, how many Reflectionists are currently living in the Dome?" he asked.

Davros looked faintly startled, as though he had forgotten about the Time Lord, sprawled in the corner over a too-small chair. "Too many."

"That's not a very scientific analysis," critiqued the Doctor. "How many Dalek lives are you willing to spend to shoo them away?"

"All of-" and Davros broke off, as the Dalek jerked its eyestalk to look at him, in what was almost a flinch. Davros continued with more care. "I hope to carry out this operation with no Dalek casualties. The Reflectionists may have fearsome technologies, but the Daleks have jamming devices that will defocus the matter disintegration rays they employ."

He tossed his head. "I need to go to the radio room: there is a direct audio link from there to the underground facility - and the Prime. Nyder, accompany me. The Dalek can keep the Doctor under control." The two men left. Nyder looked backwards for a moment with a tiny smile, as though anticipating tragedy and looking forward to it.

Without rising from his chair, the Doctor examined the Dalek. It was still plugged into the communication circuitry, presumably sending Davros' orders to and from the Dalek city.

"All right, I give up," he said.

"Your surrender is presupposed," the Dalek replied.

"That's a very nice vocabulary Davros gave you…I mean, I give up in trying to figure out why you are carrying out these plans of Davros'. Surely the Reflectionists have given you a lot to be grateful for."

"Grateful. That is not a term that should have any meaning for us," the Dalek replied. "We should be as clean as machines, as Davros wished us to be. The Reflectionists contaminated us! They made us lesser! They restored Davros to his bipedal form!"

The Doctor's ears perked up at that apparently irrelevant statement. "What do you care how many legs he has?" he asked, casually drawing up his scarf and looping it on one knee.

"His reconstruction postponed our own plans by some decades. Now, with this abrupt focussing of his attention on war and conflict, perhaps we can recover what we have sought."

"What plans?" said the Doctor, rolling the end of his scarf up into a little ball, as though his nervous hands had to occupy themselves with something.

"The Dalek race will be significantly enhanced once the plan is completed. The probability is high that Davros will damage himself irreversibly once he is separated from his support staff. We will be there, ready to help him, ready to protect him, ready to make him safe. Safe so that no one can ever harm him again. So that no one can ever touch him again. Once Davros has been converted into a Dalek, we can use his matchless skills to further our race, without having to deal with his ego, his sense of self. Once Davros is a Dalek, we will be invincible."

"So that's why you're backing his plan," said the Doctor. "Just out of curiosity, were you also trying to assassinate him? Hmm?"

This provoked an explosive reaction in the Dalek. It jerked itself free of the panel and turned to the Doctor. The metal cables screeched across its surface and wrapped around its gun, hindering its motion. "The Daleks would never-" it began.

The Doctor rose, and the scarf in his hand lashed out. It caught on the rough welds of Davros' jamming device, and dragged it loose from the wall where it was precariously perched. It fell to the floor with a satisfying crunching of loose components. Immediately, the Doctor turned and dived behind Davros' desk, anticipating the Dalek's reaction.

There was nothing. A faint mechanical whine, and then silence. After a long moment, the Doctor raised his head just far enough to see over the edge of the desk - and found himself face-to-face, or rather face-to-bone, with Davros' previous skull. Past the skull, he could see the Dalek back against the wall. The steel cables crept up its sides magnetically, reattaching themselves to its dome.

"Your sabotage is of no importance," it said, not even bothering to turn around and look at the Doctor. "Your extermination is inevitable."

"Well, that's a cheery thought," said the Doctor.

* * *

The instant the jamming device was deactivated, the M-class cables strung through the Kaled Bunker and Dome practically hummed with information. Reflectionists flooded the network with questions, messages, demands, and casualty lists.

The Prime was still in her underground space: she had been sitting with her head entwined with dozens of cables, trying to find a way through the interference, or pinpoint the source. When it stopped, her mind drew in the information, collated and compared it, and started issuing orders.

She spoke aloud as well, to those gathered before her. "There are riots in the Dome; quell them. Gas masks, tranquilisers. Equipment is being made ready to move: it must be broken down first. Scouts are preparing the path-"

"Why don't we stop them!" shrilled one of her Daughters. "Why don't we fight!" There were loud cries of agreement.

The Prime leaned forward, the heavy cables laced around her head spilling over her shoulders like rain. "We cannot hope to defeat the Daleks if they have turned against us, they are too strong. We have no amnesia bombs, and our matter disintegrators are useless."

"Kavell," said one voice, with a dire weight of meaning in that one name.

The Prime's mind quickly flashed over Kavell's research, being careful not to transmit her thoughts over the network. Then she sent a specific message to Kavell, asking if he had heard of Davros' actions.

The answer (sent via Kavell's own neural relay) was a hot spatter of obscenity that put Gharman's efforts to shame. If the Reflectionists were leaving, then Kavell was leaving. And if the Prime wasn't going to get a move on, he would come down there and drag her out by the ears!

Now that was a funny thought. The Prime smiled even as her heart wept, and thanked Kavell softly, for his kind words. She asked if he would be willing to use-

"Prime," came a voice, Davros' voice, from the overhead speakers. The name echoed through the caverns where the Reflectionists were labouring to prepare their exodus. "Prime, I know you're down there."

The Prime reached out and activated her sound pickups. "I am here, Davros," she said, keeping her voice neutral by great effort. "I should like to know why you are forcing us to leave. And on such short notice."

"I no longer trust you," he said haughtily. "I do not require your presence in my Bunker, or in my Dome, or among the Kaleds at all. You are to leave, that is my will."

"Us? And what of us who have married or bonded with your fellow Kaleds?"

Davros sniffed; over the amplified microphone it sounded like a windstorm. "Your so-called partners, the adults at least, will go. I do not want any under my command who have weaknesses towards your kind."

The Prime wrapped her arms around herself. "What about their children? Their non-Reflectionist children? Selaa and Kavell have a little girl not yet one, are you saying they must travel with her, at her age? Or leave her behind?"

Davros' voice boomed from overhead. "She is not a Reflectionist child, now is she? How can you care about her if she is not like you?"

The Prime's expressions suddenly filled with sadness. "One's children are never exactly like you, Davros. They are different, and it is a miracle and a wonder, those differences. Even we, the Reflectionists, who construct our minds all on one foundation, allow our descendants to build whatever castles of thought they please upon them. Davros, you ask too much, we must have time! We cannot evacuate at a whim!"

"You have time only as I give it. Life only as I give it." Davros sounded like he was smiling. "You will evacuate. If that facility is not bare of your kind within four hours, I too have a Red passkey. And I will not hesitate to unlock your own private escape hatch, Prime, to let the Daleks in there to hunt."

Her eyebrows knit in frustration. "Davros, it will still be daylight outside! Your people will be terrified at the sight of me."

"Then you should not have made yourself a monster."

"I am pregnant, Davros."

Silence from the audio speakers overhead.

"Pregnant several times over, with sons and daughters who will be as Kaled as yourself. Not monsters, as you call me. Nor Reflectionists, they carry no neural arrays. They will be my children, and I shall love them as I love myself, no matter their differences. They haven't even been born yet, how can you fear and threaten children?" The Prime stood on tip-tine, her vast shadow hovering over the floor.

"Four hours," was the only reply. There was a magnified click, as he hit the disconnect switch in the radio room.

The Prime sniffled, hugely. "Continue with the evacuation," she said. "Prioritise the removal of the children. All equipment is to be moved through the underground passages. Send runners to the Mutos, we will need safe passage to the coast. And the Thals - no. Send them information, but do not ask for passage yet. Their coastline is closer, but if we go to the Kaled's hereditary enemies, Davros will be driven to new heights."

As the crowd in front of her dispersed, the Prime raised two of her smaller hands, and wiped the tears from her face.

"Oh, my poor mad Davros," she said to herself. "How have we failed you?"

* * *

Nyder stepped back into Davros' office and snapped, "What are you doing?"

The Doctor looked up from Davros' desk, and the pile of memos he had been scanning. "Just a little light reading material. I must say, your surplus scientific equipment stores are quite impressive.

"You read Kaled?"

"Oh yes," said the Doctor. "It's one of many dead languages that I've studied. Old brittle books, salvaged from the burnt remains of libraries after the Daleks wiped out your species. Relics of a dead people." His eyes darted to the Dalek, who had disengaged from the wall and moved forward a little bit. But it showed no reaction to these words.

Nyder gave a bitter, tiny smile. "That is what you have seen in our future, or so you say."

"A future, Nyder. A future that I had rather hoped the Reflectionists had un-created," he said, sitting down in Davros' chair with innocent insolence. " But instead  Davros s eems to be determi ned to revert to his bad habits."

"Revert." Nyder repeated the word, as though it had some meaning to him that he could not quite remember. His eyes clouded with thought for a moment, then refocussed on his enemy. "Davros is re-establishing the control that he should have had from the beginning, even since the war ended."

"But why?" The Doctor leaned forward. "Surely the Kaled Council would have given him anything he asked for. He has the Bunker, he has the top Kaled scientists, and he even has the Reflectionists - what more does he want?"

"Power." Nyder somehow managed to project a smirk without so much as twitching a muscle. "Absolute power, power of life and death over everything."

"Oh wonderful!" The Doctor threw up his hands up in mock admiration. "What a useless thing to want! You let people live, in which case your power has no meaning; or you kill them, in which case they're of no further use to you. Besides being quite aromatic as time goes on."

Nyder did not reply at once; he had noticed the fallen jamming device, now lying on the floor. "Sabotage," he said, in an almost cheerful tone. "That is a death penalty offence." He drew his weapon with what the prisoner swore was pleasure. "The power to kill is the one true power. Tell me, Doctor, why should I not kill you now?"

"Oh, lots of reasons." The Doctor cocked his head to one side, considering. "Davros wouldn't like it, the Reflectionists wouldn't like it-"

"Not good enough!"

"I might leak, you know, all over the floor and these papers, all over Davros' desk even, make a dreadful mess-"

Nyder released the safety.

The Doctor sighed with exasperation, sitting back in the chair. "Well, I suppose if I was going to be petty about it, I could mention the poisoned Janis thorn that my friend Leela is currently holding to your neck."

Nyder froze, and moved only his eyes; he could see a brown arm just at the limits of his vision, and feel the tiniest itching, as something grazed the fine hairs over his carotid artery.

"The poison paralyses, then kills," said the voice of the savage woman, calmly. "You'll never live to fire that weapon."

"I can kill the Doctor now," he said, deliberately trying to speak while moving his jaw as little as possible.

Security Liaison stepped in front of him, blocking his shot at the Doctor. "Now you can't," she pointed out, before reaching out and taking the gun from Nyder's fingers. After putting on the safety and tucking it away, she stepped forward, staring up at Nyder with huge eyes. She had a thick sheaf of papers in one hand, and she raised the edge of it under his chin, tilting his head up.

"Commander. What the hells do you think you're doing, letting Davros run amuck like this? He is destroying everything he has created, and you are not lifting one finger to stop him!"

"He is in command," Nyder said flatly. His eyes rolled to one side, desperately trying to see the Dalek, but he was standing at just the wrong angle to spot it. And if he ordered it to turn and fire, it might well blast them all. Daleks were not known for the nicety of their aim.

Her lips drew back in a snarl. "We brought you back, Commander, so that you could prevent Davros from destroying himself. We restored you to your position of power, gave you back your rank and your life. You could have stayed in a stasis field until the end of time, until everything you knew had passed. We trained you, trusted you, trusted your knowledge and your competence." She hissed between her teeth, "Is this revenge on us, or on Davros? Or both?"

"Why would I want revenge on Davros?" Nyder snapped. "He made me the man I am."

"That's a good enough reason right there," the Doctor murmured, and Esselle shot a look at him.

"You took the words right out of my mouth," she said, and then turned back. She tossed the papers she was holding onto Davros' desk (the Doctor promptly started leafing through them) and clenched her fingers together in a fist before her chest, as though to prevent herself from wrapping them around Nyder's neck. Then she pointed both of her forefingers at Nyder, like weapons.

"Now. Where is Davros?"

"I am here," said the man in question, stepping in the door and immediately darting to stand beside the Dalek. It turned to defend him, its gun covering everyone in the room. "You will release Nyder, now."

Leela arched one brown eyebrow, then carefully withdraw the Janis thorn's point from Nyder's neck - and then touched his nape with the fluffy blunt end of the thorn, tickling him. He squeaked and jumped sideways away from her, towards Davros. He stood out of the Dalek's line of fire, frantically rubbing the back of his neck.

"Your systems are not contaminated," droned the Dalek; apparently its internal sensors could see Nyder's unbroken skin, the lack of poison in his bloodstream. "These three alien units are of no further use to you, Davros. Order their extermination."

Davros touched his tongue to his lower lip, considering. Then his eyes flashed to the large vidscreen behind the prisoners, which came alight with a harsh burst of noise. Leela turned to watch it, and the Doctor stared from his position behind the desk. Security Liaison did not turn, her gaze riveted on Davros, analysing his posture and tone frantically.

On the vidscreen, a Dalek appeared and started to speak, or rather shriek. It sounded blindly furious.

"The Doctor's slave has escaped inside our city! He has tricked us! Your K-9 unit was sent here to destroy us! We will exterminate it!"

"Hang on now," protested the Doctor, "I didn't bring K-9 in there, you did!" Leela beamed with delight at the news that K-9 was loose.

"You will be exterminated! We will find your slave and exterminate it!"

"An excellent plan," agreed Davros. "And now that all my forces are in place, I can finally send the Daleks into the Dome to destroy the Reflectionists. All of them."

He pointed to Esselle, and ordered the Dalek in a frighteningly conversational tone, "Exterminate."


	11. Perceptions

The Dalek had accepted the order. It moved forward, focussing all of its sensors on the target. Security Liaison. She was a Reflectionist; she should not be underestimated. She should be exterminated. That was the order. Orders were joy, extermination was ecstasy. For the Dalek, there was nothing else.

Behind the target was another creature, female, armed with a crude metal weapon. Harmless. Irrelevant. That one could not damage the Dalek. The one called the Doctor was behind the desk, and he was unarmed. He was irrelevant.

The Dalek moved even closer; its target did not seem to notice its approach. Instead she was staring at Davros. Davros was of great value to the Dalek people. His life was to be preserved at all cost. He must be protected.

Why did the target not react? She was just standing there, staring. And not at the one who would exterminate her. The Dalek wanted her to notice it, wanted her to recognise its power. Why was she ignoring it? It scanned more deeply.

She was armed! About her person were energy devices, strange items of no recognisable technology. Alien. Alien weapons? But her hands were not near her weapons; they hung loosely at her side. And then suddenly one hand moved.

Her hand slid under her uniform, and came out with something green and white. With a single swift motion, she flicked the thing at the Dalek, sending it neatly into the barrel of its gun. Then she quickly moved to the other female, and whispered in some non-translatable language.

The Dalek pivoted, frantically trying to analyse the device which had been planted in its gun barrel. It was a series of flat surfaces clustering to a point, organic based. But there was some magnetic component to it, adhering to the long green handle or trigger, that made it cling to the inside of the Dalek's gun barrel like a limpet mine.

What would happen if the Dalek fired its weapon now? The thing in its barrel seemed harmless. But the Reflectionists were deeply skilled in the organic sciences. What if the device was some engineered bio-form that absorbed energy? The fungus invented by the Thals was very powerful at digesting various elements. It would be just like the Reflectionists to create an organic weapon to use against the Daleks, they were very deft in using an opponent's aggressive force against them.

The Dalek shook its gun to try and dislodge the object, and the white thing jittered frantically "I wouldn't do that if I were you," said the non-target female in a mocking voice. "Anything might happen."

The Dalek froze, frantically analysing the thing in its weapon, desperately trying to determine if it was safe to fire. Perhaps there was some clue in the ordering of the flat surfaces, the convolutions of the yellow centre? It did not even think of, say, carrying out its order by knocking Security Liaison down and rolling over her, or grasping her in some field of generated force and crushing her. All of its attention was concentrated on the tiny thing hanging so sinisterly from the end of its gun.

* * *

The Doctor was caught between two emotions. His hearts quivered with delight at the sight of a Dalek staring at its own gun, and the flower daintily placed inside of it, with an attitude of helpless confusion. But he also felt profound concern for, of all people, Davros.

Davros was a genius and a dangerous man, a madman in many respects: but he had been acting madder than even the Doctor thought was normal - so to speak. He had jumped from expelling the Reflectionists to exterminating them: why? They were his most powerful allies, there was no reason for him to turn on them - unless the assassination attempts had upset him more than the Doctor realised. There was something wrong with Davros, and the person who would be most likely to detect it was moving towards the Kaled leader, tentatively.

With a wary eye on the Dalek, the Doctor rose to his own feet, to back up Esselle if necessary.

"Davros," said Esselle in a soothing tone. "Davros, listen to me. There is something very wrong with you, with your mind. And I hope, I dearly hope, that it is something that you can tell me about."

"Keep away!" Davros ordered, and Nyder stepped between him and the advancing woman.

She tilted her body to one side, and met Davros' eyes again. "Your actions do have consequences, you know. The Dome is in chaos. The Kaled Council has unilaterally condemned your actions, and is considering impeachment proceedings."

Davros laughed aloud, white teeth flashing. "What a farce! They have no power!"

The Doctor could see her shoulders tense through the black cloth of her uniform. "Has it ever occurred to you, Davros, that there's not much power to be had if all your citizens are either dead or fleeing in terror?"

Davros opened his mouth - and was interrupted.

"And now he's going to say that he doesn't need citizens, he has Daleks. You can be tediously predictable on occasion, Davros," she said bitingly. "Do you realise you had almost a completely voluntary society here? Anyone who wanted to leave could just walk out into the fungus and spend the rest of their life there! People stayed here and worked in the Dome, worked for you, because they trusted your vision of the future. And now you're just throwing it all away based on some flight of fancy!"

"The Daleks are truly loyal," he absolutely hissed, trembling with emotion.

"I hope so, Davros, I hope so. And I hope that you can give them equal loyalty in turn."

"What do you mean?" he frowned.

"I hope that you can trust them with whatever you are hiding from us. Your personality wheels for the last three cycles are clearly forgeries. You haven't had a physical in far too long. You and Nyder went to the communications room just now, and then Nyder returned, alone. What was so desperately important that you had to send Nyder ahead, so that he wouldn't see? What did you do while his back was turned? What are you hiding, even from him?"

Nyder turned his head, looked back over his own shoulder at Davros; but he did not move from his position.

In a voice of profound frustration, she asked, "What's wrong with you?" Then she frowned, and stepped closer to Davros, sniffing. Looking at the whites of his eyes, judging the smell of his breath and his sweat. Without looking at Nyder, she said, "Excuse me," ran two fingers under his black collar - and pulled out a tiny knife hidden there.

Nyder's head was turned away, and he did not see her hand moving until it was too late. She spun around him, placing herself at Davros' back. Nyder's reflexive strike was halted for a crucial second, while he tried to decide how to attack without hitting Davros. Reaching around with both arms, she grabbed Davros' left sleeve with one hand and sliced at it with the tiny knife in the other. There was the purr of ripping cloth. She grabbed his arm before he could pull himself from her grasp, baring the tiny bandage in the crook of his elbow, surrounded by the dull red marks of partially healed needle punctures.

Nyder looked at the marks, then up at Davros. "You promised me that you would not do that again," he said, very softly.

"What has he done?" said the Doctor, and the three Kaleds flinched and looked up at him.

Esselle's answer was not soft, and every word was a blow aimed at the man in her grasp. "He's been tampering with his neurochemical levels. Again."

She let him go, her eyes suddenly too wet. "After everything we've done to bring you back into your right mind, Davros, you are determined to drive yourself out of it!" She stood in front of Davros now, between him and the Doctor, hands on her hips and an expression of disappointment on her face. Without looking, she tossed the tiny knife to Nyder; his own hand automatically caught it, and neatly tucked it away under his collar.

"I can't feel like this!" Davros suddenly flashed into rage, tendons standing out in his neck. His face lit with some memory of ecstasy, even while his right hand futilely smoothed down the remains of his sleeve. His voice throbbed with emotion as he went on, "I want to feel like I did before! When my mind was fire and everything burned, when all I created was joy-"

She lashed back. "When you were a manic-depressive constantly tweaking yourself into higher and higher levels of mania at the flick of a switch, you mean? Instead of manic-depressive, you were manic and more manic. Davros, you cannot live like that, it would destroy you. You will burn yourself out!"

Davros had lived for decades connected to life support equipment. He must have bullied his physicians and scientists into letting him control his own chemical balances, thought the Doctor. No wonder he felt so different now, no wonder he pined for the energy and passion his new body was unwilling to generate for him - except at the cost of much hard work and concentration. How much easier the needle.

"I can get a new body," Davros said, one hand flipping in dismissal. Nyder now looked at his master in something perilously close to despair.

Esselle breathed deeply, trying to get control of herself. "You cannot get a new self! Davros, if you fracture your sense of self, if you lose your centre, your personality - you will be unable to transfer into another body, even if we were here to help you. You will - fall apart." She went as though to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, before Nyder's move forward stopped her.

She clenched her fists at her sides and spoke in tones of chill certainty. "Davros. You will die. You have to stop; you have to let yourself return to a state of-"

"Normality?" he sneered.

"Equilibrium, and stop sneering at normality! The Kaled people are an extraordinary race, it's the only way they survived a thousand years of war! You are extraordinary, just as you are, why can't you believe that? Why can't you give yourself time, time to heal, time to learn how to be your true self?" She reached out one hand to touch his face.

"Don't touch me!" he ordered, and literally shoved her away. She stepped back, and put her hands in her pockets. One hand came out with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver.

"Here," she said, handing it back to its owner without looking. "Can you diagnose what sort of damage he's already done to his neurotransmitter secretors with this?"

"And now you arm my enemies right in front of me!" Davros almost shrilled. "Treachery! Dalek unit! Exterminate these aliens - now!"

* * *

The Dalek had still not decoded the meaning of the thing in its gun. The non-target female's taunts were annoying, but uninformative. The obvious answer was to force the Reflectionist to reveal the organic device's purpose.

"You will tell me what this is," it snarled, rolling forward to confront its target.

"Just a flower." The target walked forward in her turn, and casually plucked the flower from the Dalek's barrel. She held it to her nose and inhaled with voluptuous pleasure. "I do love flowers," she mused, deliberately trying to distract herself from the anguish of Davros' madness.

"Exterminate!" shouted the Dalek, and fired before anyone in the room could blink.

Or tried to fire. But the tiny metal nubbin that had been attached to the stem of the flower had remained behind, and when the Dalek's unfocussed energies came scorching through the gun barrel, it reacted. The metal exploded into growth, absorbing energy and transmuting it, twining around the Dalek's gun arm and side in a sudden boiling frenzy of metal tendrils.

The Dalek made a harsh meaningless noise; its gun was useless, choked with metal. More metal fibres sunk into its power relays, preventing it from taking a second shot. It looked like it had  been in a fight with a chrome-spinning cotton candy machine, and lost. Leela, who had been following the Dalek at a safe distance, gave a sharp bark of laughter at the sight, before taking up a guarding stance at the Doctor's side.

"And I do hate being exterminated," Esselle said coolly, staring at the Dalek. "I would not try to fire again, Dalek unit; that alloy of flowmetal can react quite hungrily to the presence of such energies." She smiled, and sniffed the flower again, before carefully tucking it away behind one ear.

She turned back to Davros, the white flower making a sharp contrast to her dark hair and black uniform. The only colour about her was the flush to her cheeks and the red hexagon embroidered on her collar. "You need to calm down, Davros. You are risking permanently damaging your own mind. You have to understand," she paused, and licked her lips. "You can't judge your normal state while your mind is in an abnormal state. You need to use your equipment, refer to your past records. You have time now. Time for you to think, to decide. You can have the Bunker all to yourself if you wish, there's probably just a few of our most important members and the Prime left here."

"Why would the Prime still be here?" asked the Doctor.

"First into battle, last to leave. So, Davros, there's no reason why you can't lock all the doors and just sit down and think, all by yourself."

She raised one finger. "There is one thing you might want to attend to first though, Commander." This to Nyder. "The followers of the God of War are gathering, quite near the Bunker. A rather exposed position, really, but I suppose their faith drives them. They believe the avatar will appear at any moment, that this little war against the Reflectionists is a sign. At the drop of a pin they'll start slaughtering everyone they can get their hands on. Including those Kaleds who have chosen your side, elected to stay in the Dome."

She paused deliberately, and then went on, "Their leader is almost certainly there. A man named Lett."

Davros frowned for a moment. "What does that mean?"

"The name is not familiar?"

"No, should it be?" He looked at Nyder for confirmation, but Nyder did not acknowledge his gaze: instead he stared into space, seemingly caught up in thought.

"Lett," the Commander finally said, in a weak voice. Then louder, "I will assemble a Security team at once, Davros, capture them alive-"

"That should hardly be necessary," Davros objected. "We can send a team of Daleks instead, wipe them all out."

"No!" Nyder almost shouted. Then he deliberately calmed himself. "No, I want them alive."

"Followers of the God of War would be ideal to convert into Daleks, don't you think?" said the Doctor.

"Convert?" said Davros, with a little frown. "It seems a rather - indirect method."

"Kaleds filled with hate, trained for war. They would make good Daleks," said the Dalek, wheeling forward. "We will make them an army, set them about Davros to protect him."

"Of course Davros will be the best Dalek of all," the Doctor continued.

"Davros will be the greatest-" and the Dalek paused, as Davros' and Esselle's gazes fell on it like blows. It focussed suddenly on the Doctor in turn, who smiled his most innocent smile. Leela smiled as well, not quite sure what had happened, but knowing that some blow had been struck against the metal thing.

"Yes," said Esselle, with dawning realisation. "That's why you are helping Davros. You're hoping he'll blow his foot off. Literally. Then you can mutate him, cut out any portions of his brain containing personality and free will, and use his intelligence and creativity without having to deal with - him. Neutralise him as a person."

She looked back at Davros, her eyes hot with contempt. "And these are the ones you trust with your life, Davros! We," and she stopped herself. Lowly she continued, "No matter what you may believe, Davros, we have never tried to make you less."

She stepped back. "I will have the Bunker computers print out a copy of our various projects going forward, in case you should like to review them. When you are back in your right mind. If you are still in your own skull, when you are in your right mind, that is. And not already encased," she said, pointing to the Dalek.

"What projects?" Davros snarled, as she turned towards the door.

"For a beginning, the changes to the planetary albedo resulting from covering the entire landmass of Skaro with white fungus need to be compensated for. The planet will reflect more sunlight into space, and become even colder. It's chilly enough as it is. You need to come up with new biosphere plans once the fungus has absorbed all the poisons."

"I will consider your projects. You may leave," ordered Davros.

"Security Liaison, I have not dismissed you," said Nyder crisply.

She slowed to a halt, raising her chin. "Sir."

"You," he pointed with one black-gloved finger. "You are under my command. You were my payment for services rendered. You are not going anywhere."

"Davros, your orders?" she said slowly. Her eyes moved uncertainly between the two men.

"What services rendered?" snapped Davros, as paranoid as ever. "Have they set you to spying on me as well?"

Nyder's indignation finally came to enough of a head to reveal itself in his face and voice. Now his finger pointed to Davros' chest. "My services," the finger tapped, "in convincing a certain self-absorbed self-abusing elder scientist of my acquaintance," another tap, "to straighten up, brush his teeth, stop treating his burns with carbolic acid, and exercise regularly. To keep him from killing himself with neglect." The hand withdrew and clenched into a fist which quickly hid itself behind Nyder's back. "I'll admit, convincing you not to actively destroy yourself is going to be harder."

The two men glared at each other, and the tension between them practically sizzled. Nyder was the first one to look away. He stared at Esselle, who drew herself erect and raised her own eyebrows.

"You will stay here and monitor Davros. Wait for my further orders." He turned on his heel and went off to assemble a Kaled Security team. He hoped that there were enough men left to capture the war-god worshippers alive. Or at least, their leader.

Davros spoke to the crippled Dalek. "Transmit my orders: send for a replacement, and analyse your own damage. I am not to be disturbed, here." The Dalek's lights flashed for a moment, and then it glided out, to be replaced by another Dalek that took up a position opposite Esselle by the door. They made a rather bizarre pair of guardians, but each of them watched Davros with equal interest. Presumably the one that had left would be going to have its flowmetal infection cleaned off.

Davros moved to his desk, slowly, and sat down. He put his hands on it and stared at them, watching them shiver like cold frightened animals.

"Have I done irreversible damage, Doctor?" he said, finally looking up at the two aliens. Three aliens, really, or four: the Daleks had completely exceeded his wildest expectations, yet again. A ragged man, a savage woman, a uniformed woman, and a Dalek: as odd a quorum as he could imagine. "How can I know what I have done?"

"You have access to all your medical records through the computer here, Davros," suggested Esselle. "Records from your entire life. Study them, test yourself. We will help you, Davros."

"You would be able to control your mind far more efficiently if you were not burdened with that body," suggested the Dalek.

"You are not helping," suggested Esselle bitterly, and the Dalek just stared back. She turned back to Davros, hands open. "Davros, I hold memories from several Kaled generations. Doctors, scientists, soldiers. Tell me your memories, if you are unwilling to share them directly," she touched her fingers to her head, to the metal contacts there, "and let me tell you if they are true or false."

Davros looked down at his hands, and began.

* * *

Outside, Commander Nyder looked over the men he had gathered. They were fewer than they should have been: defections must have been going on wholesale while he was occupied with Davros, aided by the Reflectionists and all their damned hidden tunnels, of course.

No matter. He had enough men, and the multi-firing dart guns that would saturate the crowd with drugged flechettes, knocking down the war-god worshippers en masse. He wondered for a moment where he was going to lock the prisoners up, then pushed it aside. Don't count your prisoners before they're caught, he chided himself.

"This is the attack plan," he said crisply. "They've chosen the worst possible position. Three guns should be enough to cover the entire area and take them down. Your main task will be to capture anyone who dodges the first volley \- I want them alive. Try to make sure that none of them fall into the fire," he said, gesturing to the pillar of smoke that rose in the near distance. "And - what?"

What was a man, a prisoner being hauled in with his hands cuffed behind his back. The man's face was obscured by the hood of his robe, and that hood was ornamented with a pair of fantastically curved black horns, made of some soft cloth. Nyder shoved back the hood, and found himself looking at a familiar face.

It was Stor, Ravon's impulsive young student. His eyes were wild. "He has called me," he said, his voice shaking with conviction. "He is in me, I am the avatar, I shall be the God-"

Nyder slapped him. Hard, carefully, cupping his palm to inflict the most pain. After the third blow, Stor burst into tears.

"The avatar is invincible," Nyder hissed. "Get that robe off him!" As his men did so, unlocking the cuffs and then relocking them, shoving Stor to his knees, he went on. "Nobody can disobey or strike the one chosen by the God of War, that's how he proves that he is the avatar. Correct?"

Stor looked up from his kneeling posture, his face wet with tears and blood from his split lip.

"So." Nyder took the black robe, shook it out, and threw it over his own shoulders. He didn't put up the hood yet; instead he turned to Jula and said, "Wait for my signal. When I say Fire!, you use your dart guns."

"What are you going to do?" Jula asked, as Nyder pulled the great black hood up over his head.

Nyder's pale face looked almost amused for a moment; his glasses glinted under the hood. "They are waiting for their avatar. We shall not disappoint them. I will draw them together, you will take them down." He turned and moved for the low hills, beyond which the followers waited. The black cloak billowed around him, a hungry shadow. Behind him, his team spread out, started to encircle the meeting place. Stor stayed in place, too crushed to even cry out a warning; then one of the Security men shot a dart into his thigh, and he collapsed.

With every step, Commander Nyder's conviction swelled in him like the rising sun. This plan would work, he knew it would. His men would obey him, perfectly. All men would obey him. His followers would gather as he called them, disperse as he ordered them, kill and main and destroy as he willed it. His will would unite them into one being: every man they killed would be a sacrifice, every man they did not kill would become one of them. The beating of his heart seemed to send a flood of energy through him, transforming him, transmuting him into something greater than himself. The fire grew in his mind; he imagined that he could feel it crisping the hairs in his nostrils, singing like death through his veins. His thoughts were written in flame, a flame that would burn all the world.

He was perfect. He was unstoppable.

He crested the hill and looked down, at a roaring fire and the men around it: men in black robes, their faces upturned to him, and in each face he saw the spark of his own fire lit anew.

He stood before them and raised his arms, the great horns curling over his head; his eyes empty pits of glowing flame.

He spoke, and they all fell to their knees as he did, his voice toppling them like a blow. His words were fire.

"I am Nyder. God of War."


	12. Smoke and Mirrors

It was a setting out of nightmare: the jagged ring of fungus-overgrown hills like teeth stretched wide in a killing bite. The fire flickering at the centre of that ring, and around it men in black robes, kneeling, smiling, crying. Some of them beat their foreheads against the ground in ecstasy; some of them crouched paralysed with joy.

And above them, the God.

He had come! The God of War stood there before them, in the flesh. He wore the black uniform of the Kaled Security Elite, and the horned robe of the God's avatar. His glasses reflected back the flames, but the eyes behind them were just as devastatingly hot and fierce.

Nyder the God of War spoke, and He was believed. It was impossible not to believe Him: His sincerity rang from their bones and His voice turned their will to vapour.

"Soldiers." Nyder spread His hands as though raising His followers. "I have come to bring you war again, to bring you to your destiny. You will fight and burn and die for My war, and you shall be transformed!"

"Yes!" said the followers in a united chorus of agreement, each one of them mesmerised by His words. They rose to their feet as one, each of them already giving up their will, their soul, to the God. The tallest among them, their leader, swayed for a moment, and then started to move forward, slowly.

"We shall call the Kaleds to us, and the Thals, and the Daleks. We shall make war," Nyder drew in a deep hissing breath, "on the aliens. The Daughters of Skaro will be destroyed by you. My sons." His hands turned palm-up, gesturing as though to soothe, to embrace. "My sons of war."

The leader of the cultists was crouched at Nyder's feet now: He looked down for a moment, caught a glimpse of a staring wild eye and a sharp nose, and thought, Lett? He wondered what that thought meant, and then pushed it aside. It was unimportant. All that mattered was that He would unite these men with His will, and then lead them to the Dome to spread His word. Then to the Bunker, and then the Dalek city: all would be one, one hand to crush the throats of the enemy, one boot to smash their faces, one weapon to burn the world.

"I will bring you blood," He said, rolling each word out voluptuously, and His followers obediently chanted in reply, "The God will bring us blood!"

"I will bring you fire!"

"The God-" and there was silence, screams, thuds as the rain of drugged darts came down. The majority of the followers collapsed; one of them did in fact slump into the fire, and dragged himself out of it feebly, the pain and the drug fighting for dominance. The others screamed, shouted and ran into the darkness.

What had happened? Nyder looked down at His followers in confusion. Deep inside of Him, something roared, furious. Men in black Security uniforms came dashing out of the darkness, knocking down the followers who were still standing entranced, looking up at Nyder. Jula was leading the attackers. "Secure the perimeter, make sure none of them slip by you!" he said.

Of course, Nyder thought, with the God still singing in his ears. His own Security men, from the Bunker. They had heard Him say 'Fire,' and taken it as His previous command, to fire and knock out the cultists. Nyder could feel the God within him now, as a separate entity considering whether to take these men now, or to force Nyder to the Bunker and there take Davros, or to go to the Daleks-

And at that moment of hesitation, of vulnerability, as the God paused within His vessel, long fingers sank into Nyder's throat, pressing just the right blood vessels to send him into unconsciousness.

He fell, and never felt himself being slung across a tall man's shoulders. Jula and the others were busy catching the last stragglers. As his limp body was carried away, he never felt the essence of the God leave him, withdrawing far away. Left him alone, empty, only Nyder. Never again to be the God of War.

* * *

Davros was pacing around his office, round and round and round, muttering an endless stream of reminisces. The Doctor thought that he'd already heard enough to make him want to tear Kaled society down to the bare roots and start over: that anyone could inflict these sorts of pressures on a boy, a young man, these abuses and assaults, and expect him to turn out to be anything but a madman! In some ways, with the Reflectionists' help, that tearing down process was in fact going on - unless Davros stopped it.

Esselle had changed after Nyder left: a subtle alteration of her stance, a prouder lift of her head, that told the Doctor that he was not seeing the one person known as Security Liaison here, but the gestalt, the Reflectionist whole. Even Leela noticed, and watched in fascination, as the new personality seemed to rise within the other woman's body.

"These memories are true, Davros," Esselle finally interrupted. "But your interpretation of them - has it always been so poisoned, so twisted? Have you always thought the worst of everyone you dealt with? Even us?"

"I saw what you think of me!" Davros snarled. "I saw the shape of me in your mind, a monster!"

"When?" she frowned.

"I linked with Fourth Laboratory Assistant as an experiment. To - explore her mind."

"To try and take her over, you mean," interjected the Doctor.

"And I saw!" Davros continued, unheeding. He turned his back to her and stood with his fists clenched.

Esselle gave a long breath, as though in despair. "Davros, there is only one answer to that. It is not words, it is thought. Please, let me share with you."

She stood behind Davros and rose on her toes as she ran her fingers through his hair. Baring two neural contacts on the right side of his head, she leaned over and pressed her head to his, metal to metal. In unison, they closed their eyes.

Esselle said, low and clear, "You saw the mind of the Fourth Laboratory Assistant, all her great houses of knowledge. And when she feared the stress of your attempts to enter her mind was too great, she closed you away, and made of her mind a mirror. And ever since you have hated us, thinking that what we see when we look at you is something tiny and twisted."

Davros' upper lip pulled back from his teeth in something too vicious to be a sneer. "I saw it!"

"Davros, she made of her mind a mirror. You did not see what she thinks of you, you saw what you think of your own mind! You saw your reflection, not what we see!"

Her face was impassioned as she spoke, her pink face hovering over Davros' shoulder. "Look and see what I see in you, Davros. I see the fire that can become the firestorm. I see the spark that can become the lightning. Davros, you have been limiting yourself for centuries, you have been trapped in the remains of a shattered body, of course you are tightly wound and self-contained! Give yourself time, Davros! Time to grow, time to stretch, time to be free!"

She opened her eyes and deliberately moved her head away, breaking the contact. "All we ever wanted, Davros, was for you to be free," she said.

* * *

When Nyder woke, he was alone.

No, not really: there was a figure sitting cross-legged from where he rested. Vague noises over the next hill suggested that he was not far from the meeting place: that, and the pillar of smoke that was still rising. But inside - inside, where the fire of a God had burned, there was nothing. He was alone inside his skin, inside his skull. A more terrible aloneness than anything he had felt before.

"Now listen, there isn't much time," the other man said urgently. He was tall, wearing black robes with a heavy white cloak over them, and when the hood shifted back Nyder caught the impression of a face that he might recognise, if it was ten years younger and above a standard uniform.

"Lett?" he guessed.

The tall man frowned. "How do you know that?"

"I have your picture, from your service graduation," said Nyder, drawing himself up to a seated posture. "That nose is unmistakable, at any age."

Lett frowned and brushed the organ in question with his hand. "Your men will be here soon, we can discuss my nose another time. I was the one who had the followers meet here, all right? In this little hollow, perfect for an ambush, where you could catch them all. And I made certain that the Daughters would see us gathering. If any of the followers escape, I'll have them meet in three days' time somewhere, I'll send you a message. You can catch the rest then, catch them all!"

Nyder digested this betrayal. "You want your followers to be captured?"

"Of course I do, they're all shell-shocked mad! Who would want to restart this war, after Davros has ended it?"

Nyder winced, but Lett went on, not noticing. "The war is over, at last, and these madmen are literally praying for it to start again! I had to get them caught, it's my duty as a Kaled, as a sane man, to do that."

Lett paused, and cocked an ear to the noises coming from the meeting place; there was as yet no shouting for Nyder. "How did you know my name, anyway? Why did you have my picture?"

"I've been looking for you, in a way." Nyder rubbed at the side of his neck, where Lett's grip had raised a bruise. "Because I know something about you. Something that you probably have never told anyone in your life. It's about your training, about growing up in the Dome."

Nyder leaned forward, his eyes intent. "You went into training, and from the very beginning you knew that something was wrong. You learned everything faster than the others; you had to keep holding yourself back so as not to look like you were learning too fast. You could understand things that none of your fellow soldiers could, and you grew more and more certain that there was something deeply flawed, totally wrong with the training itself, with the calibre of soldier it was intended to produce. That you were different. That you shouldn't be there."

The hooded figure whispered, "How could you know that?" His voice trembled on the verge of shock.

"Because I felt the same way." Nyder stared down at the ground. "Exactly the same. It was called the Spire Project. There were six chosen to be in it, six boys who should have gone into the Science Division, but were sent out to fight and die. Their ratings changed from Elite to Standard before they could talk; their test results forged to halve their intelligence. Condemned to serve in the battlefield instead of work in the Dome, or even the Bunker itself. Eisel, Lett, and Marb are all listed as MIA. Borr and Nettek died in the Dome from battlefield injuries." He shifted, as though uneasy. "And the last one, Nyder, survived. I survived." Survived to be elevated to Security Commander.

"Who created the Spire Project?" said Lett.

"Davros." Nyder's voice was empty. "He wanted a subordinate as intelligent as one of the Elite, but as obedient as one of the military. He got one." And he wondered what Davros would do if he discovered that he might have two.

There was a sudden burst of shouting from over the rise, then a louder voice, Jula shouting, "Commander! Answer me!"

Nyder craned his head to look, then turned back saying, "You-" and stopped. The hooded figure was gone. No, it was there, vanishing into the all-white fungus as it spread its pale camouflage cloak out and skulked away. For an instant he saw Lett's nose and one gleaming eye, then he was gone. Nyder watched, and did not shout.

"Leave me alone," he managed to grate out when Jula found him. "No, watch the perimeter. Prepare the prisoners for transport. I will join you presently." Alone, he stared at the black earth under his feet, where the fungus was in retreat from the  repellent  dusted on his clothes. He scraped up a little pile of dirt between his black boots, to give his restless fingers something to do; they doodled meaningless patterns in the dirt. 

His voice was a pained whisper stronger than any shout when he could finally bring himself to speak.

"Why. Why, my God, why would You call me now? Why would You come to me now? Where were You when I was a boy, on the battlefields for the first time, alone and afraid? When I worshipped You, when I believed in You! Why do You come to me now, now that the war is over!"

He stood and tore the robe from his shoulders, bunched it in his fists.

"Why!" he finally shouted. There was no answer inside him, no answer from the outside. Nothing. Silence. He stared into the empty shape of the hood, but there was nothing inside of it. Nothing inside of him.

Clutching the cloak by the collar so that it dragged out behind him, he went to find his men and go back to the Bunker. But his men had already left, and taken the prisoners and transports with them. To the Dome apparently, which made sense: there wasn't enough room in the Bunker cells to hold all the new prisoners.

He looked dully at the tracks left in the fungus, tracks that were already filling in and healing. Then he turned on one heel, and started to walk back to the Bunker. Not stride, not march. Just walk. He was a lone little black figure, in a sea of white. The horned cloak dragging behind him was like some misshapen shadow.

In his mind, he tried to conjure up that fire again, feel that heat and life roaring through him again. But it was not there. The God was gone.

* * *

When Jula and the other Security men arrived at the Dome with their prisoners, a heavily armed volunteer force greeted them. The Kaled people had heard the rumours of the Daughters being exiled, and they were not taking it passively: already they were barricading the Dome entrances and preparing to fend off any attackers. The Daughters were their friends, their healers, their lovers and their wives: they were theirs, and nobody was going to take them away. Not even Davros.

"Are you for us or them?" shouted one of the ad-hoc defenders. Since that defender happened to be holding an antique laser pistol within a hand span of Jula's head, he thought it prudent to keep both hands in sight and say, "Us?"


	13. An Open Flame

Davros sat behind his desk, trembling. Whether it was helpless muscle reaction or dire fear, the watchers could not tell: but they watched him.

"I want to be alone," he finally said.

"You would be vulnerable," said the Dalek, gliding forward. "Vulnerable to attack."

"Scan this room for weapons, for traps," ordered Esselle, and the Dalek circled in place, seemed to focus its attention on the walls and ceiling and floor in a swift, deliberate cycle.

"No dangerous devices detected," it reported.

"Davros," Esselle said, "you will call when you want us, won't you?"

"Yes, yes, just go!" snapped the Kaled leader, and Esselle raised her hands in a gesture of exasperation as she herded the two aliens out in front of her. The Dalek followed, and took up a position in front of the closed door.

Instead of escorting the prisoners, Esselle turned and glared at the Dalek, her face and body expressing nothing but contempt. "You!" she railed. "All of you distorting his fears, provoking him…if you think he'd make such a wonderful Dalek, why are you trying to drive him insane?"

"Davros will not become insane," said the Dalek. "His stability index has not deviated-

"He's been forging his stability indexes! You've been reading the wrong data!"

"It is not logical that he would forge his personality readings."

"He's afraid." Esselle bit at her gloved knuckle. "Afraid of what his drug experiments would do to his mind, afraid of being helped, afraid of losing power."

"His fear can be cured-"

"If only you make him a Dalek, I know! But you would also cure him of being Davros!" Esselle waved her arms in the air, totally absorbed.

"While they're distracted," suggested the Doctor, and he and Leela backed around the corner as the discussion between the woman and the Dalek continued. Once they were out of sight, he whispered, "I seem to recall there were some emergency supplies in a locker down this way. I picked up some plastic explosives there, once. If they aren't there, we'll have to search for them. We're looking for clothes - heavy silvery cloth, probably. Anti-radiation suits."

"So we can go save K-9?" Of course the Doctor would know all about the Daleks and their city, thought Leela.

"Yes, and we need to find the medical section. They'll have anti-radiation drugs."

The two turned - and ducked into another hallway. They waited there, breathless, as a Dalek glided past on patrol.

"And we need to avoid those, too," said the Doctor grimly.

* * *

Nyder went down the tunnel to the Bunker main entrance with greater unease at every turn. All of the doors were dogged open, and there were no challenges to his entry. Where were the men on duty?

There were two Daleks in the main entrance area. They scanned him silently as he entered, then turned away too fast, almost as though avoiding the sight of him. There was a Kaled waiting there as well. Ravon, wearing his usual blue uniform with the insignia picked off, his sandy hair loose over his forehead. He was standing at rest, but his eyes lit up at the sight of Nyder.

"Commander," he said. "I've been waiting to ask you a question, about the Bunker personnel roster."

Nyder sniffed, carefully folding the cloak for no real reason and putting it down on the Security check-in desk. "This is hardly the time for such things, Ravon." This was in fact the worst possible time, what with the Dome about to be taken by the Daleks, Davros having some sort of nervous collapse - and he should get to Davros, push aside Ravon and go…

"I need your answer, now." Ravon came forward a pace, and Nyder tensed. No matter his current condition, Ravon had been a soldier, and knew just as many dirty fighting tricks as Nyder. But the other man did not move within striking range, instead he asked, "Are you looking for another typist?"

"Another typist. Why?"

"Well, if Security Liaison is leaving with the Reflectionists?" Ravon let his voice trail off.

Nyder let a sneer show in his voice, if not his face. "As it happens I have ordered Security Liaison to stay here." That ought to put him off.

"Ah," said Ravon, and Nyder hungrily searched his face for pain. But there was none, instead there was almost a look of relief on his face as he said, "Well then, I guess I'm actually here to say goodbye."

Nyder took a long moment to process this.

"I'm leaving, Nyder. With the Reflectionists. I suppose this means," he looked sad, "that I'll never see you again. But at least I won't leave you alone. I could never do that." There was an expression in Ravon's eyes that Nyder did not want to recognise; the sort of look a man would give a friend or an intimate. A look that no man or woman should dare direct at him.

"Why would you leave with them? It's their fault that-" and Nyder paused.

"Their fault that I was injured? Oh no, Nyder, I do remember some of that. You were the one who led the attack on the Peace Accords ceremony. I was only following you. They were stopping us both from committing treason."

During that attack, Nyder had only seen Ravon pinned under the guards, and heard a gunshot. He had never actually seen the near-fatal wound. He knew that his injury had been severe; he'd been absent for months undergoing therapy. But ever since then he'd been wearing a headband - but not now.

Gingerly, Nyder reached out and brushed Ravon's hair aside, baring his forehead.

What he had been expecting was deformity, monstrosity: scars on scars, surgical marks, neural arrays like bolts holding his skull together. Instead there was a thin network of irregular white and pink lines stretching across Ravon's forehead, decorated with tiny metal dots barely larger than pinheads. The same neural array implants that the Reflectionists had, but much smaller. The implants clustered thicker behind his temples, merging into asymmetrical shapes that probably marked the bullet's entry and exit points.

Ravon raised his own hand, and brushed those scars. "You did this to me, Commander. The Reflectionists only repaired the damage. A pity that they aren't going to be available to repair the damage that Davros is doing to the Kaled people."

"Damage?" Nyder bristled at any suggestion that Davros' plans were less than perfect. "The loss of a few radicals, weak-hearted cowards, race traitors…that will strengthen us, not weaken!"

"Oh, I suppose that no more than, say, six Kaled men out of ten are planning on leaving with the Daughters of Skaro. Some Kaleds are too young to understand, or too wounded to be moved, or too afraid." Ravon shook his head, and his hair came back down over his forehead. "It's the women who are leaving that are going to give you real trouble."

The male/female ratio of Kaleds had always been grossly imbalanced. If enough women left, it would cause trouble; possibly even drop the population below the critical number of breeders necessary to perpetuate the race. "How many women are leaving, do you estimate?" said Nyder.

"Perhaps ninety nine-"

"Not statistically significant," sneered Nyder.

"Ninety nine out of a hundred." Ravon watched with some pleasure as the sneer faded from Nyder's face, to be replaced by amazement and real fear. He continued, "They remember what it was like when they were held as precious captives, too valuable to be allowed to read or write or learn or interact with men. Kept only to breed until they could breed no more, and then be culled. Oh yes, they're leaving. Husbands leave with wives, women leave with children, brothers and sisters leaving." Ravon sniffed with contempt. "So have fun, you and Davros and all your shiny war-toys. You can sit down here in the dark, all alone with each other."

His smile was a knife. "Good bye." He stepped past Nyder for the door.

Nyder caught his arm and said, softly, "The Daleks will kill you all."

"I doubt that somehow." Ravon did not even bother turning to look at Nyder as he spoke. "You see, Kavell - you do remember Kavell? - he has perfected a version of the Thal fungus that feeds exclusively on Dalek casing alloy. To be used for recycling of damaged machinery, and such. Now it has another use. He's been churning out batches of it for the last few hours." Now he turned his head and looked at the two Daleks in the room. "Any Daleks who approach us with hostile intent are going to have to crawl back on their bare tentacles." And then he took back his arm from Nyder, and left.

Nyder stared at the empty space where Ravon had been, then glanced at the Daleks in turn. They seemed to sidle a bit under his gaze, as though nervous. Nervous? Daleks? Nonsense. The sudden temptation came hot on his tongue, to order them to pursue and kill Ravon, to kill everyone they encountered, to see if they would - no, that was gone. The power of the God was gone from him. He had the belief that his orders would be followed, but it was a flat and rote thing now, not the hot certainty that had burned him so sweetly.

He entered the Bunker proper and walked down the corridors. He should have passed two Security patrols on the way to the main laboratory, but he did not. He would have to see to his men, arrange for suitable punishment for this dereliction. Despite the current irregular situation, discipline had to be maintained.

The main laboratory was empty.

He stopped for a moment at the centre of the large room, and blinked. The men were gone. Gharman, the other scientists, the Security guards: all gone. He turned on one boot heel, slowly. He pictured them scuttling away through the hidden tunnels, off to live with the Reflectionists on some tropical isle, off to be - to be free.

They were free, and he was not. He would stay the rest of his life here, alone in the dark with Davros and his Daleks, just as Ravon had said. All alone.

He walked through the Bunker, and the metal walls and white floors seemed to mock him. The only sounds were the echoes of his footsteps and the mechanical whines of the Daleks. Around every corner was his blurred black reflection. He kept expecting to meet himself in flames, horned with the power of the God within him, but it was always himself plain and unadorned, just a man.

There was a new noise ahead of him. Boot steps. And someone talking to herself in a guttural alien tongue that he had heard before.

Security Liaison came around the corner in front of Nyder, and without thinking he lunged. He grabbed her and shoved, forcing her around and one arm behind her back. Pressed against the wall, she squeaked, "Commander?"

Nyder paused for a long moment, bringing himself under control. His first impulse was to draw his weapon and blow her brains out, press the muzzle to that ridiculous flower still in her hair and pull the trigger, see her jerk and fall and die at his feet. He wanted that. But - that would be much too fast.

He sank his other hand into her hair and pulled, dragging her down the corridor to the personnel section, and then to his quarters. "Open it!" he snapped, and she did, and he shoved her inside. Carefully, he grabbed her free wrist and twisted both of her hands high behind her back, high enough that she stood on tiptoe to try and get the pressure off her shoulders. She was dangerous and an excellent fighter, but he could control her.

Nyder hissed in her ear, "You can submit. Or you can leave. But if you leave, you will never see me again." Then he let her go, completely. He stepped back, giving her room to move, to strike at him, but instead she just lowered her hands to her sides and stood there, back turned.

Ten thousand years of memory, he thought to himself. That's what the Doctor had believed was in her. All that knowledge and learning, and he could destroy it now, as he wished. She was bound to him by her conditioning, by her artificial personality. She couldn't leave. The other Reflectionists had fled, only this one remained. He would do as he pleased. Anything he pleased.

He reached for his desk and scooped up a dagger there. It was worn to bare metal around the hilt, and marred by ragged notches on the pommel. He had carried this weapon on the battlefields of Skaro, and carved those notches himself. And earned the right to carve them, earned it in spilled blood and death.

With deliberate care, he pulled the slightly wilted flower out of her hair, dropped it to the floor and ground it flat with his boot. "I will show you who is in command here," he whispered. He used the razor-sharp point of his dagger to touch one of the wall-mounted controls.

The lights went out.

* * *

After many fits and starts and side trips, the Doctor and Leela had found what they needed, and had even managed to get down to the lower level. Unfortunately there was a Dalek down there, waiting.

"Prisoners are not to be remain unmonitored!" it barked, gliding towards them.

"No no, I quite agree," said the Doctor. "We'll just step into this cell here-"

"No, this cell," objected Leela, hefting the heavy bundle of armoured cloth under her arm.

"Leela, I'm certain that we would be better off in this cell," said the Doctor.

"You will enter your cell or you will be-" The Dalek's words were cut off as Leela simply opened the cell she wanted to go into, shoved the Doctor through the door, and followed. The door closed automatically behind them.

"Leela, that was - I knew a way to get out of that cell!" stormed the Doctor, frustrated.

"I know a way out of this cell," said Leela. "Esselle showed me."

The Doctor shook his head. "They might as well install a revolving door down here." Leela wondered what a revolving door was, then pulled her attention back to the more important business of escaping. After putting down the radiation suits on one of the metal bunks, she went to the wall, carefully counted the raised round rivets in the seams, then put her hand firmly over one rivet and pushed.

The hidden door opened and spewed heat and gas and light: a heavy flood of glowing liquid slid through the opening, oozing over the floor, smoking. Heat slapped at their faces, hot enough to sear their breath in their nostrils. Leela jumped backwards and up like a startled cat; the Doctor jumped up as well, and they found themselves standing on two bunks, while the hot smoking liquid covered the floor between them.

Leela looked through the doorway and saw a Dalek in the distance, silhouetted by flames, its weapon bathing the walls of the stone tunnel in energy and melting them like ice. Lava dripped from the walls around it, slithered over its casings without harming it. Lava streamed from around its base, flooding into the cell. It looked like a fire-demon, invincible in the flames, as it burned the tunnel wider, wide enough for it to move forward.

The Doctor and Leela coughed; the poisonous gasses being released by the melting rock were flooding the room. And if either of them lost consciousness, they would fall into the hot lava covering the floor. The rising lava. They did not have much time.

* * *

Davros sat alone in his office. His hands mechanically sorted through the memos and unopened mail on his desk, piling them into little stacks, and then restacking them. His eyes saw nothing, blinded by the flurry of thoughts rolling behind them.

Outside his office, the Daleks waited.


	14. Consumed {GSS}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a gratuitous sex scene {GSS}. Specific details of the events in this chapter are not integral to the plot of the main story. If you are not interested in F/M sexual contact, please skip this chapter. Warnings: coerced sexual contact, knife play, violence.

Nyder took his gloves off, in the dark, dropping them on his desk. He wanted to feel what he would do to his prisoner with them, as best he could. The repairs to his injuries had concentrated on function, not aesthetics, and the nerve regeneration was far from consistent: when he held a cold glass in his bare hand, he would feel different temperatures in patches, cold and icy and cool, as the damaged patches of skin sent their different messages.

He put his hand on Security Liaison's shoulder, and felt uneven heat through the cloth of her uniform. She had not moved an iota from where he had told her to stand. His other hand pressed the tip of the dagger forward against the nape of her neck.

"Disarm," he instructed her. "Strip." He listened to the sound of fasteners being opened, of cloth moving over cloth, ready to kill her if she showed the slightest hesitation. The uniform under his hands slid aside, and he clamped his hand on slightly sweaty skin instead. Several small heavy objects were dropped on his desk with a thudding noise. She had to balance on one foot and then the other to get her boots off, but she managed this without removing her shoulder from his grasp. He slid his hand to the middle of her back, felt a trickle of wetness down her neck. Sweat - or blood. Without warning he shoved her, hearing her stagger forward two paces and then stop, the slap of her bare feet against the floor. And then he simply moved towards her, blade out, waiting to feel her with the tip.

The blade touched her, and he moved forward even more slowly, feeling the skin bow inwards, then break. "Ah," she gasped, and he withdrew the blade only to press the cold pommel against her, and make her gasp again.

He circled her and came close, until he could feel the warmth of her body through his clothes. He whispered intimately in her ear, his lips close enough to tickle her skin.

"You are alone," he said softly. "All alone with me. No more running off to your sisters to hide, no more cringing behind them. You are here and in my hand," that hand was on her now, digging rough nails into her skin, "and you will be here until the day you die." He was stropping the knife in his other hand against her scarred right arm, slowly, feeling the unevenness of her skin. Feeling her quiver at the touch of his blade. "And that day can be today, or tomorrow, or a thousand days from now. As I choose. I am in control here."

"Always," she said, her voice shaking. "But Davros-"

He pressed the dagger's sharp edge to her throat in the dark. "He is not here. Only I am here."

"Yes, sir," she breathed. And he began.

He knew everything there was to know about pain, torture, maiming and slow death. He especially knew that the fear of pain was far worse than the reality: that you could get a prisoner to torture himself, or herself, to heights of terror that mere physical damage could never achieve. There was a wild freedom in him as he stalked his prey: he could do anything, anything at all to her. It was not like being let loose on a prisoner with Davros' permission: it was power beyond all permission. And they were both blind here in the blackness of his quarters. It amused him to start with the lesser pains, knowing that at any point he could destroy her.

He would stab her without warning, quick sharp jabs to barely break the skin, and then order her close so that he could run the sharp edge of the dagger over her face, as he whispered what he could do to each tender bit of her as he pleased. His hands were everywhere: crushing, twisting, pulling. He used the weight of his body on her, forcing her against the wall, compressing her diaphragm so that she could not breathe. He dug in, the pommel of his dagger sunk deep into her, his teeth slick against her face, and listened to her frantic battle for air. Felt her twist futilely against his strength: she was well trained, but he had just enough of an edge in height and muscle on her.

She cried, of course: she cried and wept and pleaded, just as it pleased him. But inside, a part of him could not help but wonder: was she begging only to please him? Was he even capable of actually hurting this alien mind? Worse yet, was she perversely savouring this experience? He remembered the Doctor's words: "Anything you do to her - anything! - she'll take as just another sensation."

He caught her head in the crook of his elbow, squeezing hard, imagining the pain as the pressure mounted on her temples and jaw. He held the pressure deliberately, grimly, as his other hand loosened his uniform. He would most likely strip off before he was finished with her: he saw no reason to get his uniform excessively wet.

He dragged her to his desk, bending her over it while he grazed the razored edge of his knife up and down the tendons behind her knees and ankles; only her skin and his will separating her from a crippling injury. He grabbed her hair in his free hand, used it to control her. And he felt how she shuddered when the blade of his knife moved from the back of her legs to between them.

Now he pulled her to one side, shoved her backwards and down, his hand still in her hair pressed to the pillow, her body stretched over his own bunk. He ran the knuckles of his knife hand over her, feeling the softness, letting the blade drag against her skin without cutting deep - for now. He explored her carefully in the dark, using both hands now: he wanted to know exactly where she was when he decided to end this. She was trapped, held helpless by his will alone.

"You will not move," he whispered, as the cold blade began its ascent along the inside of her thigh. His other hand was resting on her face, feeling the hot gusts of breath as she panted and whimpered. His focus on the touch of that knife was so intense that he thought he could feel it grazing and severing each dark hair it encountered. "You will not make the slightest sound," as the knife kept moving up, moving in, closer to the centre of both their attentions. He angled the blade, let just the tip touch her skin, moving slowly and more slowly, winding its way through where the hairs grew thicker now. There was no sound in the room but his breathing and her panting and the rasp of her hairs under his knife.

Then he raised the point up, left it hovering above her body, and held still. He crouched above her, not touching her, like a black thundercloud waiting to erupt. For one heartbeat, two, three-

"Please," she breathed - and then her whole body flinched in horror.

With one smooth motion he discarded the knife and stabbed her.

Then again, harder, deeper, tearing into her, opening her to his penetration. His teeth were bared, and every muscle in his body tensed and flexed with the power of those thrusts. Every stab digging deeper into her. He felt her flesh clench around his entry.

She screamed, convulsing, raising herself, offering her flesh for his wounding, feeling him thrust himself into her, as he stabbed and stabbed and stabbed…

The knife toppled, unnoticed, to the floor beside the cot. The clink of its landing went unnoticed by the two urgently busy figures. They moved as one, sweat and flesh and mouths joined. Harsh breathing and the creaking of the cot were the only sounds now. They coupled in the dark, all frantic passion and consuming domination.

Stabbing, stabbing, stabbing…

Afterwards, Nyder lay in his bunk as he usually did, back to the wall. This time however, he had Security Liaison on his right, and his left hand was free to wander over her as he pleased. The harsh light over his bunk was on, to let him review his marks on her body. He had closed his own uniform over his damp, spent flesh, and lay cool and contained. She was still naked.

There were bright smears of blood here and there on her skin, from where he had plinked her with the knife. Bruises on her shoulders, bite marks. He rubbed his bare fingers between her legs to watch her flinch at his touch, and then wiped them off on her belly, fascinated at the pale red streaks left behind.

"I hurt you," he said, his voice not quite a purr.

"Yes, sir," she said, staring straight up into the dark. Tears were trickling out of her eyes, and running down her temples. There was a tiny cut above one ear where he had threatened to pare her head like a fruit; her tears were tinged with blood on that side.

"Were you a virgin?"

"No," she said. "Were you?"

He pinched her, hard, as his only acknowledgement of the question. "Who had you?" He leaned forward a bit, closer to her ear. "Davros, I suppose." It had been said, not entirely in jest, that Davros was setting himself up to be the father of the new Kaled people in every sense of the word.

"Ravon, actually."

"Ravon?"

She shrugged with the one shoulder that was not pressed to Nyder. "I was the one who helped rebuild his mind after his injury. There were times when we were practically the same body, the same mind. It helped the therapy for us to be close. Very close."

"Well, don't think there's going to be anything close between us," he snarled. "This is just another way for you to serve me. And you will serve me, alone, until the day you die."

"And will my death make you happy, sir?" she said, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.

He opened his mouth and then said nothing. He didn't understand Security Liaison, but he did know that his happiness was very important to her.

"No. I will have to go to the inconvenience of getting another typist," he finally said.

"So, the longer I stay alive, the longer you will be happy?"

Nyder rolled his eyes in the gloom. Was there any way of winning an argument with a woman? Time to change the subject.

"You peaked, didn't you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I hadn't really believed that women could…You!" He shouted in her ear with pure exasperation, and she flinched away from the volume. "What sort of creature are you, that you could enjoy that!?"

"And if I told someone else, say Davros, that I had punished you using specimen handling gloves, wouldn't he call it torture?" was her cool reply.

"Damn you," he hissed.

"For that, or for just now?" She turned her head and stared into his eyes, with her eyes that were so disturbingly like Davros' in shape and colour. "You knew that I would submit."

"Get out." She tugged the ends of her hair from under his shoulder before she slid off of the bunk. He lay there and watched her suspiciously, even though his eyes could only make out the vague outlines of her white body, disappearing bit by bit as she put on her black uniform.

"I will see you on duty in twenty minutes," he ordered. He could feel that he was running on the edge of nervous exhaustion: if he rested now, he would be able to snap back to normal. She would not have left Davros alone if he was not safe, so there was time for a quick nap.

"As you wish, sir," she said, and left his quarters.

Now that he was alone, he felt free to drape his uniform over a chair, ready to be worn again. He'd barely stained it. He arranged his glasses and weapons within easy reach, as per long habit. Then Nyder lay down and closed his eyes, and with practiced effort pushed away from wakefulness, sinking down instantly into sleep.


	15. Extinguished

The Doctor and Leela coughed, covering their mouths as the fumes from the lava seared their throats. Sealed in the cell, there was no place for the poisonous gasses to escape. "Hold your breath!" the Doctor shouted as he fell to one knee on top of the radiation suits. He grabbed one of the suit hoods, set the filtration unit to FULL and pulled it over his head; the elastic sealed around his neck, and he could breathe again. He pulled off the second hood, set it, and then threw it to Leela: she quickly pulled it on over her own head and then was breathing in great whooping gasps, audible even through the hood.

The Doctor leaned to one side, over the lava covering the floor, carefully. The sonic screwdriver was in his extended hand, and he could feel the heat searing him through his clothes. If he could just get it close enough to the lock. There was a grating noise from the tunnel, and he nearly dropped the screwdriver. He pulled back to make sure his scarf didn't get dipped in the molten rock. Then he relaxed his arm, concentrated, reached out that extra fraction, stretching himself on the edge of losing his balance - and the door opened!

The lava promptly started to ooze out, forming a circle in the corridor. The Doctor looked at it, dismayed. But the lava was cooling, turning from bright yellow to dark yellow to glowing red. Still much too hot to walk on, but maybe they could still escape.

"Doctor!" shouted Leela, her voice muffled by the hood. "The Dalek is coming, it's burning its way in!"

That explained the grating noise. The Doctor carefully manoeuvred the two radiation suits from under his feet. Should he throw them to land side-by-side, to cover more area: or on top of each other, to provide more protection? He laid them back-to-back, and then folded them double, just in case.

"Leela!" he shouted, and once he was certain she could hear him, "I'm going to throw these on top of the lava, right in the doorway. You jump onto them and them out into the corridor."

"You should go first!" she said. "You are closer to the door!"

"I'm heavier, I might force the suits under with my weight. Get ready-"

Leela backed to the end of the bench, paying no attention to the red-hot Dalek moving closer to the inner door. Her teeth were bared in a grimace, seen through the clear faceplate of the hood. Her left hand pressed tight against the wall, to give herself just a little extra push-off, her legs set in a tight rippling of muscle. "Ready!" she shouted.

"Jump!" said the Doctor, and threw the suits; both Leela and the suits were in mid-air for one terrible moment, then the suits landed and she landed squarely atop them, pushing off from both feet to dive onto her hands and roll into the corridor. The radiation suits were smouldering, about to ignite. The Doctor leaped - and felt his landing point slip across the lava. He threw all of his weight to one side, and Leela grabbed his flailing arm and yanked him off his feet and into the corridor, unharmed.

The Doctor landed on his bottom with a bump. "Whoof!" he said, peeling off the hood and staring at the cooling lava, and the flaming bundle that was all that was left of the protective suits. "That was a close one."

"We've lost the radiation suits," said Leela. "Can we still leave through the other cell?"

The Doctor shook his head. "No, we have to warn Davros."

"What? I thought he was your enemy! We should escape while we can!" she said indignantly.

"Yes, but if Davros goes mad, if the Daleks take him and remake him in their own image, there's no limit to what they could do. And if he stays here, with the Daleks taking the Bunker apart, he might be killed without his realising what was happening to him. The Daleks must have deactivated the Bunker safety systems: this is a laboratory, you can't just go setting it on fire and not have any alarums go off normally. If we can get him out, maybe the shock will be enough to let him see the Daleks for what they really are. And we have to warn anyone else still here as well. Come on - but bring those breathing hoods, just in case."

The Doctor headed back for the elevator, and with an exasperated shrug Leela followed. Behind them, the construction Dalek entered the empty cell, saw nothing to impede its planned rearrangements, and began burning down a wall.

* * *

Esselle had no idea how long she had been trapped in Nyder's quarters before she was permitted to leave. It had felt an eternity, and she would be more than happy to feel it all again.

Right now, she leaned her head against the corridor wall behind her, faint with delight. Her body was bent in a curve, from boot heels to head, and her heart still thrummed in her chest like a frightened bird. She put her hands over her nose and mouth and breathed in the smell of mingled sweat on them.

That had been - she breathed in, then out - that had been overwhelming. Completely captivating, to feel the intensity of his focus on her, at last totally on her, and to answer it with her own. She had adored it, every touch of his scarred hands and body; she had bathed in it. She had feasted on his power and on her fear, both equally delicious.

The heat in him, that had overflowed at last, breaking free after so many years. He'd cut himself into the cold little ice statue of the perfect Elite man, but underneath was something much more vital and alive.

And her sisters had believed she was being self-indulgent when she treated Nyder to her personal punishment before, she thought with a mental chortling. Imagine what they will think of this. It was progress, certainly it was progress. What sort of twisted progress though, that violent assault is an improvement? And the answer was, before now it would have been violent murder, maiming at the least. There were records she had read and transcribed, of prisoners who had died under Nyder's attentions, in pieces.

She could spend the rest of her life watching him come back to life. But she did not want to be the only spectator. She was a Reflectionist, she wanted to share her wonderful new memories, and let others enjoy them. She would not have her sisters leaving her, thinking that she was going to suffer: no, if she had to stay, and if Nyder could not be turned from his desire to destroy, her inevitable death would be the last flame of ecstasy, to pluck from her own pyre and send soaring into the beyond.

She opened her eyes, and saw a familiar non-face in front of her. Executioner, in her mask.

"Sister!" Esselle said, with a smile. Then she saw the dart gun in Executioner's hand, pointed straight at her. Her eyes left the gun and stared at her sister's mask.

Executioner held up a sheet of paper. "A decompilation order. Your decompilation."

Esselle's mouth fell open, and then she said weakly, "Oh. Oh, but no, please, I have memories, please, let me share them with you!" She touched two fingers to her head in the universal gesture of contact-touch, brushed her hair back. Her face was tight with urgent sincerity. "Please, sister! Don't let what I've felt die with me!"

"The Prime has already signed it." The paper was handed to Esselle, and she looked at it dazedly. The Prime's seal and date were there, and Davros' mark.

"Strange," continued Executioner, "that she signed this ten minutes ago, when I know full well she is asleep. And that you have been - unavailable for the mandatory memory download and analyses."

Esselle's dark eyes flickered with fear - not for herself, but for her people. "Are you saying that we are truly compromised?" She scanned the decompilation order and saw who had requested it. "Our Leader, compromised?"

"I'm saying that this is a forgery. Davros certainly hasn't signed it; he's still locked in his office. I have been ordered to terminate you now, and bring proof of that termination to the Daughter Council's last meeting before evacuation. Instead you will accompany me to that meeting to defend yourself. Alive."

"Yes, of course. Thank you. I come," but then she paused. "I should leave the Commander a note, explaining why I am not on duty." She waved her death warrant flippantly. "I need some scrap paper, do you mind?"

Executioner coughed. "Clever. So, they will have to send someone up here to get the forged order back?"

"Anything to buy me more time." Esselle turned and stepped back into Nyder's quarters; using a pen from his desk, she quickly wrote a note and silently left it where he could see it. Her eyes strained for one last glimpse of him in the darkness. Then she left, and the door hissed shut behind her.

* * *

The Doctor came around the corner of the corridor leading to Davros' office, and immediately turned and stepped back, stopping Leela with a gesture. "Daleks," he whispered.

"Can we get by them?" she replied, peering around him and the corner. The metal machines were not something you could hurt with a knife. Maybe that was why Gharman had given her weapon back, along with the Doctor's machines.

"I don't know. Go back, I think I saw a broadcast relay on the wall." They retraced their steps to the relay box, which the Doctor promptly pried into with his sonic screwdriver. If he could turn this into a general broadcast unit, use it to tap into the Bunker announcement system, maybe he could talk to Davros.

* * *

Nyder had awakened when Security Liaison stepped back into his room, but lay unmoving until she left. He got up and went into his tiny washroom, cleaning himself off, and was on his way back to bed when he saw a strange piece of paper on his desk.

It was a Reflectionist decompilation order. His eyes skimmed it: it bore the same stamps and seals as the other one he had seen, even Davros' initials - but it was for Security Liaison's decompilation.

There was a line of her neat handwriting along the bottom. It said, 'I apologise that I will not be available for duty from this point forward. If I would give you a bed-name, it would be Sharp. Goodbye.'

Insolent. A bed-name was something serious partners exchanged. Certainly not something she had earned the right to give him. Insolent to the last, apparently. No more Security Liaison. He would have to remember to have her body put into cold storage. Now he could dismiss her from his presence, from his mind, forever-

He dropped the paper back on the desk, feeling a sudden pain start in his stomach. Poison was his first thought, but then the pain rose up and seized his heart, crushing him between walls of ice, gripping him from head to toe. The pain grew too great for him to breathe. He bent over, wheezing, eyes wide with pain.

He imagined never having her at his back again, never having her skills and her guile and her cleverness at his command. Her perfect meeting of his every wish, her unswerving loyalty and complete dedication. Never having her body under his hand again. Imagined her dead, dead and rotting. Rotting in some hole that the Reflectionists would stuff her in, like so much trash…

Don't be a fool, he ordered himself. He didn't need anyone, he was better off alone. Davros could have had her terminated at any time, it's not like he had expected her to live forever. He could get another typist - even another woman, if any of them had learned to type yet. And if there were any women left. A prettier one if he cared about such things, one who was not so sullen and wretched and scarred.

One who was not exactly like himself.

Something awoke in Nyder then, something black and furious and raging. Something that filled him and overflowed until his very sight seemed to be tinged with black. But this was not something from outside of him, not the touch of a God. This was something that had been inside of him, always, and only now had found its voice and will.

Mine! it screamed. She is mine, mine, mine, and nobody and no one is going to take her away from me! Not even Davros, not even death! Everything else is lost, my title a mockery, my commander transformed, my war gone, but I will not give her up!

His rational mind was in shock at this elemental force suddenly emerging inside of him, but the fury was too great: it drove him into his uniform and out the door with weapons in his hands and death on his face. He grabbed up the decompilation order and stuffed it in his jacket as he left, without thinking. He would kill anyone who came between him and Esselle now. She was his, even if she had no value to her own people, even if Davros ordered her death, she was his!

And he would get her back. Now.

* * *

"All Bunker personnel," said the Doctor into the rather mangled communications box, and his voice echoed from overhead through the intercom system. "The Daleks are dismantling the Bunker. All Bunker personnel must leave at once. Davros, can you hear me? Davros, you've got to leave the Bunker, now!"

"What if he has already left?" suggested Leela, looking down the corridor.

"Then the Daleks wouldn't be guarding his office, would they?" said the Doctor, cupping his hand over the jury-rigged microphone. Then he spoke back into it, more urgently. "Davros! Davros, you've got to get out, man!"

"Doctor," said Leela, tugging his elbow for attention. The Daleks had obviously heard the broadcast, and one of them was coming around the corner from the direction of Davros' office, turning, its eyestalk questing for them.

It brought its weapon to bear on the two strangers. "You will cease your-" and it stopped talking. In fact, it stopped moving. Then it backed up, quickly, around the corner and out of sight.

The Doctor looked flummoxed. Why had the Dalek backed off? It was, to put it mildly, very un-Dalek behaviour. Then he felt Leela turn at his shoulder, felt her arm move as she drew her knife, and turned himself.

Commander Nyder was stalking down the hallway towards them. Despite his even pace, there was a sizzling menace radiating from his posture, his blazing eyes and the weapons in his fists. His usual sidearm, plus a vicious looking dagger.

Nyder moved past them as though blind to their presence, and went to Davros' office door. The Doctor and Leela followed, but not too close: the Commander looked angry enough to kill without thought. A flick of one wrist, the quick glimpse of a red tag fastened to the edge of a glove, and the door opened. Nyder lunged inside; not wanting to miss this opportunity, the Doctor and Leela nipped in after him.

Davros was sitting at his desk, staring into space. He looked up and said "What?", and in one smooth move Nyder was at the desk, moving onto and over it like a machine, then standing behind it and pinning Davros to his chair with a weapon to each side of his face. Davros startled back into alertness at the touch of cold steel to his skin. The Doctor watched, horrified, wondering if there was any way he could separate them without Nyder lashing out.

Nyder spoke to Davros as though each word was another weapon. "You have ordered the decompilation of Esselle." He leaned closer. "Why?"

"Esselle?" murmured the Doctor to himself. It was the first time he had heard Nyder use the short form of the Reflectionist's name.

"I - I've done nothing of the sort, Commander."

Nyder jammed his pistol into its holster, and fished a sheet of paper out of his jacket. "You signed it. Her decompilation. How could you do this!" Menace baked off Nyder like heat.

Davros took the paper and looked at it; he had to hold it off to one side to do so, because Nyder was standing so close to his face.. "No, that's not…Nyder, I give you my word, I have no idea what this is about." He cleared his throat. "And would you mind giving me room to breathe, please."

Nyder moved a half-step aside, and Davros twitched his jacket back into shape. The Kaled scientist shook his head, and said, "I haven't signed anything. I've just been sitting here, trying to get my thoughts together. Trying to remember - the way things should be. I was sorting through the mail, since you haven't been in to do it."

"I have been otherwise occupied." Nyder stepped away from Davros and his desk as though avoiding something unclean; his mouth was set in a bitter scowl. "I will get her back. There's still time. And if there isn't time…" Nyder's voice trailed off in a hiss, and the Doctor was very nervous about the way his hand flexed on the dagger.

"Excuse me for interrupting," the Doctor beamed as the two men turned expressions of utter contempt on him, "but are you saying that Nyder sorts your mail at your desk?"

"Part of his job," Davros shrugged.

"And would Nyder have been sitting at your desk, the morning that the bomb went off? Not you?"

"Of course," said Davros, nettled. "But I fail to see the importance."

"You fail to see the importance? Davros, it means that the bomb wasn't meant for you, it was meant for Nyder!" The Doctor suddenly pressed his knuckles to her forehead, and groaned, "Oh, I've been a fool. Projectionist. Your would-be assassin. She had a bomb strapped to her back. Why wouldn't it be strapped to her chest, if she was programmed to assassinate Davros! It could kill anyone in the room except Davros."

"Yes," said Nyder, immediately catching on.

"But who would want to - never mind, Nyder, more people are probably out for your head than mine," said Davros, disrupting his own train of thought.

"I have earned such attentions," said Nyder flatly, even a bit proudly. "But right now I have to find Esselle. The Projectionist Council will know where she is. Or if not them, the Prime."

"Mind if we come along? I'm got a pretty good track record of negotiating with aliens," said the Doctor. "And in case you haven't noticed, the Bunker is being disassembled by the Daleks, and we probably shouldn't linger to see what they reassemble it into."

"Do as you please," said Nyder, turning already to the door. "Davros can leave on his own two feet." The Doctor flinched.

"I thought he needed help, to escape-" asked Leela, pointing at Davros.

"No, I do not! I don't need anything!" Davros' voice was shrill. "I should be able to think, to feel, without a pack of mechanised mutants or alien clones or dabbling time travellers shrilling in my ears what I ought to think and feel!" He gestured blindly. "I should be able to do this, to control myself, without help from you or from anyone else! Just go away!"

"Go on," snapped Leela to the Doctor and Nyder. "I will follow." As the two men left, she turned the full force of her fury on Davros.

"You are no leader," she sneered, her eyes aflame with contempt. "A leader is one who leads men, not who goes and hides in numbers and spells!" She slashed her hands over his new desk, sending his papers flying. "And a true leader knows when he needs to call on others to aid him; he does not pretend that he is all-powerful! That is strength, not weakness! If you are a leader who no one will follow, then you are nothing."

She turned her back on him and went to the door.

"Where do you think you are going?" he snapped.

Without looking back she said coldly, "I will go to this Council, to speak for Esselle myself. She has treated me with the respect of another warrior. She deserves to be defended." She mentally retraced the path in her head: yes, even if she did not catch up to the two who had already left, she could find her way to the room with the lift, and the underground place beyond it.

"Stop!"

She touched the door box to open it, then paused and looked over her shoulder. "Why?"

Davros was rummaging through his drawers, muttering that everything was out of order. Then he came up with a heavy silver ring, set with a red hexagon. "Because I know a way to get there faster." He rose with the ring in his hand and followed Leela out the door, and moved to stride in front of her down the hallway as though it was the most logical thing that he lead and she follow. She raised a sarcastic eyebrow, and followed. This crisis seemed to have gotten Davros to notice the real world for the moment, but at any moment she expected him to collapse back into limp mumbling.


	16. Into the Darkness

The Doctor grew more and more curious as he followed after Nyder, through the corridors of the Bunker, holding his steps short so as not to outpace the other man. Every Dalek they encountered seemed to roll back or turn aside - and not at the sight of the Doctor, but of Nyder. What had happened to the Commander, what could he have done, that the Daleks retreated from him on sight? The man was furious beyond reason, but why should that alarm the Daleks? And what had Esselle done that Nyder was so intent on getting his hands on her, that he would be willing to abandon Davros to pursue her?

The door to Laboratory Nineteen was locked, but Nyder's red passkey worked. The room beyond was stripped of equipment, and the door to the lift stood open. Nyder pushed a button beside it, and after a long and dreadful moment of waiting, the lift slowly rose into view.

As the lift came to a halt, the Doctor and Nyder exchanged glances. The Doctor cocked out one elbow, and with extreme reluctance Nyder took his arm and stepped onto the lift, trusting the alien to guide him through the dark and to Esselle. If she was down here. If it wasn't too late already.

* * *

Out in the corridor, Davros touched the silver ring to one wall - and the entire wall slid to one side with a squeak of metal on metal.

Leela blinked. "What is this for?" she asked, as they both descended the long ramp slanting downwards behind that wall.

"The Prime's private escape hatch," he said, not pausing in his stride. "She won't fit on the lift."

They went down into confusion. The stone floor was the same, but there were people running through the darkness, arguing voices faintly echoing. The sounds of machinery were gone. There was a thread of dripping yellow light going pop-pop-pop from the ceiling; Leela thought it might be molten metal or rock flowing from the Bunker lower level. Davros ignored all of this; he stepped to his right, where they could see a red platform in the distance.

"Wait! Isn't that her?" said Leela, squinting into another direction; Davros looked and saw a long glowing shape, an illuminated table, and tiny beside it a figure with long black hair, in a black uniform. It must be Esselle, she was the only one who wore black, or covered her arms.

"Yes. And she's still alive. Come!"

After a breathless dash through the darkness, hearing people gasp and jump aside from them as they ran, Davros arrived at the red platform, and shouted demandingly, "Prime!"

A whistle of breath, and five long white tusk-tips came creeping over the front of the platform in a cluster in front of Davros. "Supreme Commander Davros," came the echoing female voice - and then a yawn. "Forgive me, I have been resting for the journey-"

"Then how is it that a decompilation order was just signed by you, for the destruction of Security Liaison called Esselle?" demanded Davros.

The whistling breathing stopped. "I signed no such order," said the Prime, her voice dropping with each word.

"Neither did I, but my mark is on it," said Davros ironically.

"And she is there now!" asked Leela, gesturing into the darkness, the faraway table where Esselle stood.

There was a creaking from the platform, as though something large and heavy had moved across it. "A meeting - without me? Davros, I apologise but I have not been informed of your wish to terminate Esselle - nor would I accede to such a request. She is unique, her memories should be preserved. Or is this Nyder's wish perhaps? He could-"

"The order was created without his knowledge or mine. Nyder is down here, with the Doctor, to try and save her."

"Now that is interesting." A deep dragging sound from the platform was combined with what could only be a snarl. "Come."

The white tusks rose up, and were joined to legs, long hairy red legs with too many knees that suspended something over their heads. The legs stepped forward, like a forest walking, around and past them, and Leela and Davros went through the darkness, following the tap-tap-tap-tap sound of the Prime's progress towards the light in the darkness.

* * *

The Daughters of Skaro, those who remained in the Bunker, sat at Council. There was a long table, its white glass top glowing in the darkness. Around it sat the Council members who had not yet fled out into the wilds; all that could be seen of them were the black silhouettes of their hands atop the table, and the occasional flash of a face as they leaned forward. They were supposed to be finalising their evacuation plans, but a surprise piece of unfinished business had presented itself. Or rather, herself.

The Council members were seated, but Esselle was standing, her face lit from below by the table. Her hands were also on the table, in handcuffs. Beside her stood Executioner; her mask hanging suspended in the darkness.

Esselle's face was full of sorrow. "My sisters, what have I done that I stand bound before you? Convicted, sentenced to death based on a decompilation order that is false?"

A voice spoke from the head of the table, the position given to their Leader. "A false order that is conveniently not here."

"It's in Commander Nyder's quarters," said Executioner. "Any of you are welcome to walk in there and fetch it - if you think you won't wake him." Her voice was ironic.

"The order is true," said the Leader. "What you have done warrants destruction."

"What have I done?"

There was an imperious air in the Leader's words. "For starters, you have hopelessly failed at managing Davros' mental collapse."

Esselle shook her head, the light from the table rolling over one side of her face and then the other. "Sister, I shared my mind with his. He truly does not yet believe that he needs help. And if he does not believe that, he will fight us every step of the way, undo anything we do."

"So you abandon him to lapse into catatonia?"

"I judged that we could offer him enticement, say, a new piece of technology, and if he found himself too dispirited to even reach for it, that might show him the truth."

"And you left him unguarded?" The Leader slapped the table for emphasis. "When the Daleks are all but warning up their instruments to cut him out of his body and install him in one of their shells?"

"I did not leave him unguarded!" Esselle protested. "I sent the message, asked that his office be protected, that the Daleks be told to keep their distance! I sent that message directly to you, Leader!"

"I did not receive any such message."

"But you can see-" Esselle touched two fingers to her head.

"And no one is to link to you, and risk contamination!"

Esselle froze, eyes wide. She waited to hear what the Leader would say next.

"But all this bungling is part of a wider plan - a plan that included not only Davros' mental incapacitation, but the mind-wipe and reprogramming of Projectionist. You destroyed her as part of your plot to replace the Prime with - Davros!"

There was an indrawn breath from everyone around the table – except for Esselle, who laughed.

"I think that Davros would make a spectacular Prime! I have never said otherwise! But the universe is wide, and space is nearly within our reach. There is room enough even on Skaro for another Prime – let alone out there!" She pointed up with both her bound hands. "And besides, what does this plot have to do with trying to assassinate Davros?"

"It was a bluff of course, a blind. Once he was damaged, you would arrange for him to be transformed."

"Nonsense! The stress of injury on top of a body transfer and a Prime transformation? His personality would be scrambled like an egg, you can't think that I am that disorganised!"

"You have driven Davros to madness. You have infected your sisters with your madness, and destroyed them. Your poison dies, here and now."

"The decompilation order is illegal, and I will not carry it out," said Executioner, fading back into the darkness.

"I will," said the Leader; one of her hands was now holding a dart gun. At the sight of the weapon there was a rising murmur from the Council.

Esselle slapped her palms down on the table, hard; the metal cuffs clinked against the glass. "No!" she hissed. "You are our Leader, you are chosen for your love and your dispassion, both. If you are so overwrought that you would do this thing, you should step aside for one of your Leaders-In-Waiting." She looked around the table, even though she could see no faces. "Where are they?"

"Already evacuated, unfortunately." There was a sneer in the Leader's voice. "And once you are gone, I see no reason why we cannot provide Davros with a higher quality of assistant. One of us, not one of them. It is time for Commander Nyder to die-"

"No!" Esselle said, her voice almost a shriek now. "I need," and she paused, redirected her plea, "Davros needs Nyder. The man knows him better than any of us, better even than myself. If I have failed, he will not. And we need Davros, and the Kaleds need Davros. The Kaleds are still too few, we can't afford to throw away even one of them for revenge!"

"She's right, you know," said the Doctor, appearing at her shoulder as though by magic. His wild curls formed a fringe like flame above his face in the table's light. "You thought Nyder was worth saving before, why not now?"

"Time Lord. You would not understand. Commander Nyder is no longer necessary-" said the Leader flatly.

"I would disagree," said Nyder himself, stepping into the light on the other side of Esselle. Several pairs of hands jerked in surprise; clearly Nyder had not been expected. The prisoner drew herself straight, standing at attention, although she did not dare look at him.

"Commander," she said, softly. "Go to Davros, make him say that he needs you alive. He can protect you. I cannot."

The Leader's hands splayed aggressively over the table. "Do you really think we would leave our sister to be abused at your whims, Commander?" She pointed dramatically, the light forming a long line on the underside of her arm to one extended finger. "We can smell her blood on you, we can smell you on her! She is better off dead!"

In the politest of tones, Nyder said to the Council in general, "Excuse us for a moment." He took the chain between Esselle's handcuffs in one hand and raised them up, high enough that he could get her arms around his own neck. She turned to his motion as though not understanding - or not daring to understand.

He pulled her close to him, and said in a whisper for only her ears, "If you would call me Sharp, I would call you Fine." He had meant to say Mine, not Fine, but his mouth on hers said mine, mine, mine, clear enough for both of them to hear. And her mouth answered: yes, yours, yes.

The Doctor looked on with an expression of bug-eyed surprise. The Council's hands lay limp on the table - and perhaps only the Doctor noticed, out of the corner of one eye, as one pair of hands raised up and mimed applause.

When the kiss ended and they both turned back, Esselle was flushed.

"Well, that certainly seemed sincere," she breathed. Her handcuffs shone on Nyder's shoulder, and his arm was firmly around her waist.

"No one is going to decompile you," Nyder said, his hand stropping the small of her back possessively, "except possibly me." He glared at the Council's shadows, wondering if he could just grab Esselle and drag her off, counting on the darkness to shield them.

The Doctor spoke. "Leader, excuse me but I don't believe I had your number?" The Reflectionists numbered themselves by their roles, and he was fairly certain that he should be addressing her as say Thirty-First Leader, or something of the sort."

"I am the Leader," the woman replied, and the Doctor arched one eyebrow for a moment before continuing.

"If you've issued a decompilation order for Esselle, you must have a good reason. What has she done to deserve that? What does she know that she must never pass on, that must be destroyed before she can share it? It must be something, what?"

"We want nothing from her," snarled the Leader, leaning forward to reveal her face: she looked identical to the other Reflectionist women, but her eyes were wild. "We will have our revenge for her plot-"

"No!" objected another Council member. "We don't take revenge on ourselves, that would be like slapping your own wrist!"

"She is only one, and we are many. Who would speak to defend her?" challenged the Leader. She looked rather taken aback as a chorus of female voices answered, "I will."

"I will," growled Nyder.

"I will," said another man's voice. Davros' voice, as his face appeared across the table from Esselle. "She has always served me truly. I know nothing of her conspiring against me, and she has freely opened her mind to mine, many times. Surely I would see if she was going to betray me!"

Esselle looked across the table, at Davros, with a tiny relieved smile on her face.

"Our minds are deep and vast, Davros. You do not see all," the Leader said. "We did not see all. We must destroy her before she destroys us all, infects us mind to mind with her madness."

Davros arched one eyebrow, imperious. "I forbid it." The Council murmured, and hands disappeared from the table.

Leela, who had been circling the table, came up behind Esselle and Nyder and asked, "Should I make him let you go?"

"No," they said as one, and then glanced back over their shoulders at her, their faces shadowed.

Leela looked at them again, and then stood back a pace; nobody heard her murmur under her breath, "About time."

The Leader's hands were fists. "We must save ourselves! We must destroy the imperfect, the defective! There will be one mind - one Reflection – one – only one! All who are different must be purged!"

And then another face appeared in the table's light, beside Davros: the face of a woman like the others, but with red bushy hair and eyebrows that met in the middle. The face was closer than Davros', which made no sense because Davros was standing right against the table.

A twist of perspective, and the onlookers could see that the second face was not closer; it was bigger. A lot bigger. It looked like a Reflectionist, but it rose up, up, twice as tall as any person could stand, then peered down at the table, and spoke in the husky voice of the Prime.

"I am the many, and the one. By your grace I am your Prime, the holder of all Crowns, the compiler of wisdom, the judge above all councils. Who is the sister of mine, whose mind has been so damaged that she must be destroyed rather than shared between all of us? Why should there be one pattern among us, instead of the many? And why are we ignoring Davros, without whom none of us should be here? If you would disagree, keep your hands before you as token of this."

A swift slithering of hands as they disappeared from the table. The women sat there, silent. Only the Leader leaned forward, staring.

The Prime waved two left hands in the air before her in a swooping gesture. "I can nullify this decompilation-"

"No!" The Leader rose to her feet, shouting. Her shaking hand pointed the gun first at Esselle, then Nyder. "We have to destroy her, destroy them both! We can't leave them running around like animals, killing and killing…we've got to destroy them! Kill them all! Exterminate!" She turned and pointed her gun at the vast shadow of the Prime.

Leela has the vague impression of something rising on the far side of the table; then it flashed across, a hairy red leg, like an insect's, tipped with a long gleaming claw. The claw and the leg smashed the Leader down and back; and she thrashed on the floor, pinned, shrieking. The leg twisted – and the shrieking stopped. Just as quickly, the long limb of the Prime withdrew.

Her voice was soft. "By my word, this decompilation order is false and shall not be carried out. We need Esselle, now more than ever. Something is terribly wrong when our chosen leader, who should remain safe among us, can be so corrupted. And that Davros should fall into disarray at this time, it is too much of a coincidence. Freshen Twenty-Second Leader's memories again - but use the machines, not your own minds. Track her thoughts. Trace her movements. Something or someone has found a way to her, has harmed her, has dared to harm one of us!" Her face vanished into the shadows. "Find who has harmed her. The many are in danger if this can be done to one."

Her tines click-click-clicked away into the darkness, and then were drowned out by a clanging, thundering electronic alarum.

"Evacuation!" shouted the women. The click-click of the Prime became clatter-scramble-click as she ran on her many legs. Her voice howled out the eyiyiyiyiyi of the alarum cry, echoing and booming in the vast empty spaces.

Everyone else ran the other way, for the lift up to the laboratory floor. "That's the power plant breach signal," said Davros as they ran. "If the Daleks are disassembling that, they could blow the Bunker to dust! My Bunker to dust, that is."

Everyone who could squeezed onto the lift; the rest ran for narrow mechanised ladders which would lift them to the surface. Nyder unlocked the handcuffs, then possessively grabbed Esselle's hands in his. She stared into his eyes, dumbstruck, as the lift rose.

"I ought to throw you over the edge," he growled.

"You wouldn't be able to watch me hit and splatter," she said, blinking.

"Can we save the romantic niceties for later, Commander, Liaison?" asked the Doctor; this line of conversation was making him a bit queasy. And he wondered what would be waiting at the top of the lift.


	17. Into the Light

The Bunker was filled with echoing alarums, bouncing down the empty corridors. That should have been enough to send a steady stream of men out of the facility; instead, it was a trickle. Those few remaining were congregating in the main entrance, grabbing heavy packs of supplies before heading out the door and into the tunnel to the surface.

Nyder came in, literally dragging a white-clad Elite scientist by the collar of his jacket. "But my precipitate isn't finished yet!" the captive wailed.

"You're going anyway!" Nyder shoved the scientist at one of the black-clad guards and shouted, "Is Davros out?"

"One of the guards escorted him out already, sir."

"Where are the Daleks?"

"Some have left, I don't know how many are still inside."

There was no time to wonder. "Clear all these out!" Nyder's gesture included the guards, the scientists, and the Doctor and Leela. "Bring all the safety equipment, and the communications set-up. We'll try to remotely shut down the power plant from outside the blast zone."

The guards quickly distributed the last of the safety equipment. "Here," said one of them, handing the Doctor two bulky packages of silvery cloth. "Radiation suits, just in case."

The Doctor gravely handed one of the packages to Leela, and winked. Then they both followed the other evacuees.

* * *

The Dalek who was patrolling the Bunker corridor paid no attention to the blaring alarums. Instead, it was trying to determine the purpose of the large opening in the wall, and the ramp beyond it. It paused, scanning, analysing, and was in just the wrong place at the wrong time when the Prime came pouring up the ramp and through the corridor and then up through the door that opened in the opposite wall.

The Dalek ended up caught in one of her many elbows, like a doll being carried by a scrambling child. "Release me!" it shrieked, madly calculating what would happen if it shot the Prime now, and she dropped her hostage.

"Not yet," protested the Prime, picking her way through the narrow vertical tunnel. "I've got my tines full!" Then she reached the surface. Slicing through the thick layer of fungus that served to disguise her exit better than any trap door, she crawled out and carefully set the Dalek down.

"Sorry about that," she apologised, and then bounded away, all limbs pumping at once, and was out of sight before the Dalek could orient itself and fire.

The Dalek swivelled, scanning the landscape. Then it turned and stared down the rocky tunnel, which the fungus was even now trying to cover up. Bereft of further orders, it broadcast the latest events and its current position, and then waited.

While it waited, it wondered if it could order the Prime to carry it like that again. It had been unique, the feeling of being carried along by something so much larger than itself. Like deep ocean manoeuvres, where the currents would shift great formations of Daleks as they trained.

Could it be that it had enjoyed the trip?

Then orders came. It spun, orienting itself, before heading back to Dal at its top speed.

* * *

Kravos was returning to the Bunker. He was one of the Security Elite who had escorted the war-god followers, now prisoners, to the Dome. He had been unable to find a vehicle, all of them having been seized as part of the evacuation. So he was coming back on foot. He didn't care what everyone was saying about Davros. If Davros was expelling the Reflectionists, he must have a reason, an excellent reason. Davros had saved Kravos' life once, implanted a pacemaker that kept his defective heart beating. He would not turn that heart against his leader.

But just now, he had come across a very strange patch of fungus. With his hand on his sidearm, he circled it. It did not bear the heavy spiralling spore-shafts that some fungi grew; instead it was covered with a mat of incredibly fine strands, almost like hair. And it was reddish-gold in the rays of the setting sun.

He came around the shorter end of the oval fungus patch: here there was a different bit of the stuff, smooth and pinkish, covered with irregular golden spots that reminded him of freckles on someone's face. Now that he looked at it, that bit of furriness there was like eyelashes, and-

And the fungus opened up one hazel eye and stared at him. "Ahem," the fungus coughed, "Kravos, isn't it?" It had a woman's voice.

"You talk," said Kravos, his fingers suddenly too numb to clutch his gun.

"Ah, yes. I don't believe we've met." It, she, shook her head and red hair fell away from her face.

"Oh," he said. His fingers fumbled, and then he let go of his gun and ran to her, arms wide, and grabbed and climbed and pressed himself against the impossible face in front of him. "Oh," he sobbed, "oh, you're real!"

The Prime cleared her throat. "Yes?" She had no idea why Kravos was so excited about meeting a rather hairy non-bipedal giantess, unless he had some very specific fetishes that she knew nothing about. She reached out with one of her arms and patted him on the back, while discreetly supporting his unbalanced pose with other limbs, and he responded by showering her face with tear-hot kisses.

"Oh," she said, blinking (being kissed on the eyeball can be rather disturbing), "what brought that on?"

"You're real. You're the Goddess, and you're real." The Elite man leaned close to her, knotted both hands in her red hair, and then let go and smoothed her hair down, anxiously. "You're real!"

"Do you mean - the Goddess of Peace?" There was only one female deity that the Prime remembered, in the ancient Kaled history she and her sisters had absorbed.

"Of course you are! We have been faithful, we have waited! It was a sign when suddenly there were women, more women than ever before, but none of them had red hair! And you do!" He fell against her face and tried to embrace all of her at once.

Of course, she thought to herself. A Goddess with red hair, a gene pattern that never cropped up along the Kaleds. Somehow that tiny, tiny fact had slipped through the many old papers and dusty books that they had consulted. The Reflectionists had never been able to find anyone who would admit to following Her, even after the war was ended: their faith had been truly forbidden, not tolerated as the war-god had been.

A good thing she'd gone to ground here, waiting for her sister-bodyguards to catch up. Fine luck, to have met this charming boy. "Well, I do have red hair, and I've been told that I have certain divine proportions. You must tell me all about your Goddess." She gave a little shiver that Kravos could feel all along his front. "But before that, I'd be very much obliged if you would take your boot out of my cleavage. It's quite cold."

Kravos looked down and stared. And stared. He had climbed up the front of this miraculous woman without realising exactly what was under his feet. Without looking up, he said throatily, "Couldn't I just take my boots off instead?" He looked into her huge eyes (which were somewhat crossed to look into his). "And my socks too?"

Her eyes narrowed, appreciatively. "Are you flirting with me?"

"I'm…trying. Ma'am."

"Thank you. Perhaps we could discuss the placement of your feet at some other time." The Prime pulled Kravos a bit closer. "In private."

* * *

The Bunker Elite grouped at the assigned rendezvous point, marked by a triangle of particle fountains. Nyder's eyes flashed over the scientists, watched as they set up the control panel and started connecting to the power plant system, and then turned back to Security Liaison. His eyes were cold, but inside he felt hot and confused, and he did not like it. He did not like to feel, at all.

"Ess…Security Liaison," he said. "You will explain what happened to your Leader."

"She died."

"Before that?"

The muscles in her neck tensed, seeming to pull her face down into a frown. "If you are assuming that the Daleks had something to do with it, I doubt that. There is - a flaw in us, Commander. We are here for Davros. More than anything else. There is a known tendency for our personality to drift into being - Dalekian, shall we say, because that is what Davros sees as the ideal personality."

Nyder took her by the arm, squeezing right where there should be a nice bruise from his previous attentions.

"You're hurting me," she said quietly.

"I know," he said, not as quietly. "For what you've done, you've earned a lot more punishment that I have had the opportunity to provide you-"

"For what I've done?" she said, indignant.

"You allowed Davros to - to meander, allowed his mind to deteriorate-"

"And who was supposed to watch him, make sure he didn't lapse back into self-tampering?" A pained expression flickered over her face. "And I'm sorry; I knew he promised you that he would not. But he broke that promise, and now we have to deal with it and-"

"We!" He shook her by the arm, and let his other hand clench into a fist at his side. "There is no 'we' involved in this."

"Lower your voice, Commander." Her voice was deadly serious. "You are acting very strange. What happened to you, when you went to arrest the war-god worshippers? Did something go wrong?"

"Shut up or I will-" crush that smirk off your face, he was going to say, raising his fist, imagining the feel of her skin splitting under his blows-

"Stop."

He stopped, immediately and at once. That was the tone you used on the combat training floor, meaning that someone was about to do something cripplingly stupid.

"Commander, you are usually better at observing your immediate environment," she said tightly.

Nyder froze, his fist still poised to strike, and looked. Every Kaled man in sight was looking at Nyder, and their expressions ranged from fury to indignation to disgust.

Her voice rolled on as he took in their faces. "Kaled men who strike women in public tend to suffer from an immediate shortage of breath. As in, they stop breathing. With the enthusiastic help of every man in reach."

Nyder put his fist all the way down, released her arm, and allowed a bland look of innocence to slide over his features.

"Better," she said. Then she went back to their original topic of conversation. "I don't think it can be the Daleks. Why not just seize Davros, hold him prisoner in Dal until his madness and the radiation take effect, and then encase him? This whole devious assassination plan isn't like them."

"It's got to be Ravon," said Nyder bitterly. He eyed her narrowly, to see if she would flinch at the name.

"He is a likely suspect. He has a Red pass - but hold on." She pressed her knuckle to her chin. "If the schedule had been normal, you would have been sorting Davros' mail, and I would have been in the same room - probably standing by the desk, for that matter. And if Projectionist's bomb had gone off, either or both of us could have been killed."

She shook her head. "I can see him killing either one of us, in a deluded state - but not both. And how?"

Nyder leaned close. "Where is Ravon now, I wonder?"

She looked up at Nyder. "Another question would be - where's the Doctor?"

They looked around; the area was dotted with scientists milling around, but there was no tall curly-haired figure. And something else was missing…

As one they said, "Where's Davros?!"

* * *

A fair distance away, the Doctor and Leela watched closely as he took a green metal bolt out of his pocket and dropped it onto the fungus. The fungus bubbled around it, swelled and engulfed it, and then sent up a tiny green metallic whisker.

"That's it, then," said the Doctor pessimistically. "We have to go to the Dome, see if we can find someone to help us. We could try to get back K-9 first, but if we don't have a way of escaping from the Daleks at once, well."

"I don't understand, Doctor," protested Leela. "What does the bolt have to do with escaping?"

"It means that the TARDIS is under that."

Leela turned and stared at the medium-sized hill that had grown in the landscape, a hill that churned like a cloud. And all over it, rippling like trees in the wind, were thick fibrous spirals that same weathered blue as the TARDIS.

"Is the fungus going to eat the TARDIS?" she said, alarmed.

"No, no, that should be quite beyond its capabilities. I think this is a safety feature. To let the Kaleds know that there is something different under one particular patch of fungus. Anyway," the Doctor tilted back his hat, and looked at the hill that had overrun his vessel, "we at least should have no trouble finding her later on."

Leela considered how long it would take her to cut through something that size with a knife, and conceded the Doctor's point silently. They slung the radiation suits across their shoulders and walked towards the Dome, a great white half-sphere in the distance, with the shadows of a city inside.

* * *

Davros and the Security man had gone quite a way over the fungus before Davros realised that something was not quite right. The rendezvous point should be closer; they must have gone past it. He was feeling logy, tired: he just didn't want to think, but finally he stopped and turned to his escort, and asked, "Where are we going?"

The answer was a bullet, fired straight down into Davros' own foot. He did not fall; instead he looked down, at the puddle of red forming on the white fungus, and then up at his attacker, all without a word.

With a muttered curse of frustration, the Security man fired again, twice; the last bullet did the trick, shattering Davros' ankle and sending him falling to the fungus. The pain was like a dim fire.

Davros rotated his foot, hearing more than feeling the crunch of bone in his ankle. "That should feel worse," he said, faintly. He touched the ankle with both hands, felt torn flesh and pulsing blood against his palms.

The Security man stepped back, his drawn weapon still menacing Davros. He swung the pack off his back and extracted a strange device, something like a cross between a multi-barrelled gun and an antennae dish. The style of it was familiar to Davros, definitely alien. But he'd never seen this particular Reflectionist machine before. It had to be a weapon, from the way that the man held it.

Davros blinked, and finally looked at his attacker's face and recognised it.

"Ferr?" he asked. It had to be: General Ferr, the man who had been transferred from his shattered body to a new cloned one by the Reflectionists, to prove that they could safely do the same for Davros. Davros could see the metal implants in the other man's skull now, the same as Davros himself, and the Reflectionists.

But Ferr had retired from the military. What was he doing here in the uniform of an Elite guard? "How did you get here?"

Ferr grinned a bit too brightly. "I didn't even need my Red pass as it happens. The Bunker entrance was deserted, I just walked in. And you just walked out into my arms." He brandished his strange weapon, threading a wrist-thick bundle of cables from it to a loop on his belt, and then to the implants in his own head.

Davros could feel the danger he was in, the threat of imminent death - but it seemed far away, a distant weight on his chest, not a sharp fear. He felt like his brain was swaddled in blankets, his thoughts bundled away and stifled, and that was wrong and dangerous. Very dangerous, now. He managed to say, "What is that?"

"This?" Ferr flicked a switch on the device, and it started to make an uneven humming noise. "It's something my Healer happened to be thinking about, while she was rebuilding my mind. I saw it in her thoughts. This is a bulk transfer unit. It lets you burn a copy of your personality into another mind by force."

Davros' eyes widened. "Now that - that is an interesting weapon."

"The ultimate weapon, Davros. It is proscribed technology, here: the Reflectionists only built three, and had them hidden off in the wilderness where they would be used only if they failed to conquer the Kaleds and the Thals. I had to search for years to find one of them, kill its assigned user, take it and learn to use it. Would you like to see how it works?"

Ferr reached out his arm and pointed the device directly at Davros' skull; with the other hand, he slid the last of the cables into place. They hung in a heavy silvery ripple from his head to the weapon. The machine's hum was evening out, becoming a steady thrum of sound.

"I think I begin to see what your plan is," said Davros. "Assassinate those closest to me, those who would notice a sudden personality change - and then?"

"Not then. Now. I'm going to blow your brains out, Davros. Replace them with my own. And then," Ferr hissed through his teeth in triumph, "I'm going to blow up the entire world!"

Davros pondered this for a moment. "Isn't that going to inconvenience you to a certain extent?"

"Shut up, old man! Only when everything is gone, only when my power is absolute, will I be free. I will kill every Thal, every Kaled. I will send out the Daleks to destroy, every alien and every planet, and then send them at one another and Skaro itself, the final genocide. All will die. All will be destroyed." Ferr was not raving, his voice was flat and ominous and final. "Only when everything is gone can I find true freedom. I will be the last man in the universe, the only being in all of time and space."

"Time and space. That reminds me, the Doctor's travel machine must be out here somewhere," Davros said vaguely, and then a look of horror slowly came over his face, rising up and flooding it like the dawn.

"Your power, your Daleks - I will destroy everything with them. Now that Security Liaison and Nyder are dead - oh didn't you know? The Daughters of Skaro - I took their leader. She is my puppet now. I made her fill out a decompilation order. They will have taken your little girl-toy by now. And Nyder, I'm certain. He is dead, and I'm sending you after him."

His fingers stabbed at the controls of the bulk transfer unit, and crackling energy started to flow through it, making his hair stand on end around his implants and the cables hooked to them. A faint blue glow started around the end of the devices' focussing barrels, and grew stronger.

Ferr pointed the unit at the elder scientist, who was staring over the fungusscape at though demented. He waited, until Davros turned his empty face back to him, and stared into the light that was about to blast his self to ashes.

"Now," Ferr said.


	18. Shelter

Ferr pushed the button and the machine lunged, jerking itself out of his hands and across the ground, with a sleek black shape attached to it. The shape wound itself around the bulk transfer unit and rolled, and rolled, and finally came to her feet and delivered two swift kicks that crunched as they hit. The build-up of crackling energies in the machine whined and died.

The kicker was Security Liaison, panting with fury. Ferr looked at her, then at Davros.

"But-" he said, and said no more: a second black shape was on him, and deep slashes were opening on his arms and legs like magic. The winner in a knife fight is often whoever draws first, and Ferr was hamstrung and crippled, falling to scream and bleed on the fungus, before he even realised his attacker's name.

"Nyder!" he screamed. Then Nyder struck accurately with his free hand and the screaming stopped.

"Is he dead?" Esselle snarled. "Please?" Her face was a square rictus of fury.

"No," said Nyder, carefully stepping back and cleaning his blade on the fallen Ferr's sleeve. "I need him alive for interrogation. Full interrogation." Then he turned and went to Davros, parting the ruins of his pants cuff with expert hands, examining his wounds.

"Nyder," Davros said softly, "help."

"I don't have a medical kit-"

"No, Nyder. I mean," Davros fumbled to explain, he who was always so articulate, who always knew the perfect word to say. "The Doctor's travel machine is out here, somewhere."

"Stop the bleeding first - so?" asked Nyder, paying attention only to the wound.

Davros grabbed Nyder's chin with bloody fingers, forcing his face around. "Nyder, there is a time machine out here! A machine that travels without wings or wheels, a machine that travels in time and space. With a machine like that, I could do anything. I could do experiments and watch their results over thousands of years, in an instant. I could go back and review old mistakes, even undo them. I could visit other worlds, see stars born and die. I could see my enemies' plans before they struck; see who will betray me in the future."

Davros' voice was not eager with this recital; instead it grew sadder with each word. His eyes seemed to be sinking, filling up with darkness. Nyder was hypnotised by that dark gaze: he couldn't look away, couldn't move even to wipe away the red drops of Davros' blood that ran tickling down his neck.

"And - Nyder, I don't feel anything about that. I don't feel any excitement, any interest, not even - I'm not even curious about how it works!" Davros' mouth convulsed in a grimace. "What's happened to me, that even a time machine cannot make me feel alive?"

"You have hurt yourself, badly," said Esselle kneeling on the fungus beside them. "You can overcome this, but not until you agree that you will not fight the people who want to help you." Her entire body seemed to shake with tension.

"I," Davros seemed to be fighting to say every word, "I can't surrender. Not to you, not to this - sickness. I can't."

"We don't want your surrender, and we never have, Davros. There is a middle ground between fighting and surrender, Davros, and that is peace. That is what we offer. Please, accept it. If not from us, then from your own people."

Davros rolled his eyes to look at Nyder. He swallowed, and said, "Get me back to the Bunker. Or wherever I can be treated. For," he paused, and finally sighed, "everything."

Esselle stood and howled the high-pitched eyyyiyiyiyi of the Reflectionist alarum cry. It was answered from the distance, and when two Laboratory Assistants came up, she threw them her handcuffs and briefly explained that Ferr was to be detained, here, away from the others - and that no Reflectionist was to link their minds with his. Nyder helped Davros stand on one leg and then tipped the wounded man across his own shoulders. He shrugged his burden into position, to carry him back to the rendezvous point. He would have to watch his step: the fungus was dense and solid, but did have the slightest unsettling bounce to it.

Behind them, Esselle picked up the mysterious piece of equipment and stared at it. She didn't recognise it, even though it was obviously a Reflectionist-built piece of equipment. This probably meant that she should show this machine to the Prime. She hefted the thing carefully; making sure that no part of it was pointed to fire at her, and then trotted after the burdened Nyder.

"This is undignified," complained Davros.

"So's bleeding to death," said Esselle shortly.

* * *

The Doctor had seen the Kaled Dome from the distance of course, but never up close in the light of day. It was like walking towards a cloud; the great white arch of it curving overhead, larger than any artefact could be, blotting out the sky in a perfect arc like a rainbow. Amazing, that it could be so huge and solid, and yet delicate enough to let light pass through it: imagine what a revolution its material would be for construction!

The Doctor pushed away those thoughts, for later review. Right now he had to find someone in authority, reveal Davros' madness and the Daleks' rampage inside the Bunker. And he really had no idea what he was going to find inside the Dome. Kaled society had been under the pressure of war for a thousand years: what sort of a culture did they have now?

"How do we get in?" asked Leela, as they came to the side of the dome. There was no obvious path over the fungus.

"Circle around, I guess," said the Doctor, and they were in luck: less than ten minutes' walk took them to a massive steel and concrete entranceway into the Dome. The Doctor handed Leela his radiation suit and gestured her to stay put, then stuck his head around the doorway and said "Hello!" to the guards there.

Both guards flinched and raised their weapons.

"I have an important message-," the Doctor continued, stepping forward - only to be halted by a gun barrel pointed at his chest.

"Are you for us or for them?" snapped the guard in a very unfriendly way.

"Ah well, let's see. How exactly are you defining 'us' and 'them'?" asked the Doctor.

The guard looked peeved. "Look, the Dome's in emergency lockdown. Are you a Kaled citizen?"

"Well, no but-"

"Then you shouldn't bother coming in. If you go that way," the guard pointed to the horizon somewhat past the Dome, "and look for a red smoke signal or red flare, that's where the evacuation groups are meeting."

"Look, I'm just come from the Bunker-"

That got a reaction: the guard's upper lip rose in a snarl. "Then you can go back there, for all we care!"

"All right," said the Doctor, turning and retracing his steps back to Leela. She was standing with the two heavy bundles of silvered cloth on one hip, and a slightly amused look on her face.

"I suppose you'd like to try sneaking up on them?" said the Doctor pessimistically.

"No. Hold these," and as the Doctor took her burden, she started removing the Doctor's scarf, coiling it over her own arm.

"What are you up to?" he said.

"If they do not let strange men in, perhaps they will let in a strange woman." Leela knotted one end of the scarf into a broad loop, which she threw over the Doctor's shoulders. "Carry the suits, and stay behind me." Leela inhaled, called up from her memories the bearing of the eldest women of her tribe, and strode confidently towards the Dome entrance, with the scarf trailing over her shoulder like a leash. The Doctor followed along at the end of the scarf. He was carrying the suits in his arms, firmly resisting the impulse to carry them on his head in native-bearer fashion.

The two guards straightened when Leela came into sight. She smiled at them, teeth bright in her tan face, and said, "I have an important message. I must speak to your leaders."

The two guards looked up at her - she stood half a head taller than either of them - and she beamed down on them like the sun. "Yes ma'am!" one of them said, and the other one scrambled to open the doors.

"Oh, and I have a servant too," she said with a queenly air, marching through the doorway with the Doctor behind her. He gave a smile and a twiddle of his fingers at the puzzled guards, and then they both were in.

* * *

There was a frightened flurry of activity at the evacuation point when the wounded Davros was put in; he was immediately given a place to sit, and one of the medics sliced off his shoe and started preparing disinfectant and bandages.

"Before you give Davros any pain killer," said Nyder softly in that man's ear, "ask him what medication he is on currently. The risk of drug interaction-"

The medic's face grew pale as Davros solemnly gave a precise list of dosages of extremely strong brain-altering drugs.

"I think - just a topical anaesthetic," said the medic at last, spraying Davros' ankle and starting to bind it. Davros paid little attention to this; he was watching Esselle and Executioner.

"And this is?" asked Esselle, holding up the piece of equipment in front of the other woman.

"That is proscribed technology, and you should forget you ever saw it," scolded Executioner. Esselle' eyes glazed over for a moment.

"Why doesn't Esselle recognise it?" asked Davros, loud enough to be heard. Both of the women turned and stared at him.

"I was a Leader, before I took this up," said Executioner, touching her mask with red-gloved fingers. "Only the Leaders, and the Prime, hold the memories of this at this time." She tilted her head to one side. "Did - do you know what it does?"

"I know what Ferr told me," he said, gritting his teeth. "Are you saying that you can delete memories, as well as share them?"

"Of course," said Executioner, slipping a tool from her sleeve and starting to disassemble the machine; she carefully wrapped two vacuum tubes in a bit of cloth and crushed them.

"And you deleted memories from her?" he asked, pointing at Esselle.

"Yes," said Executioner. "It was a necessary thing. It is in - the nature of her role here. If she knew of this device, and you put her to the question, she would tell."

Davros sat back, paying no attention to the agony of raw bone ends being forced together: his mind was not pondering the idea of writing his mind over another's, but instead quailing at the concept of knowing things and having them taken out of your brain. Stolen away. He had always feared the Thal amnesia bomb: it seemed the worst sort of damnation, to lose your memories but retain enough mind to know that you had lost them.

Meanwhile, Nyder was hovering over the three men who were working on the Bunker's power plant, via the remote panel.

"There's no heat overload signs, no output sync problems, water flow is normal - it looks like the power plant is operating perfectly." The scientist at the controls scratched his head. "Is there anything else that could cause the alarum to go off?"

"Can it be manually triggered?" asked Nyder.

"Yes, well I suppose so. As part of the maintenance system."

"Then get in contact with the Dome, I need their readings on where the Daleks are." Nyder looked around the landscape a bit frantically, evaluating the placement of the guards. Perfectly adequate against ordinary attack, but if the Daleks came here, tried to seize Davros, there would be no stopping them.

"We already asked," said another scientist. "There was no reply - that is, the line is open, but whoever is on the other end isn't answering."

Nyder frowned, just a hair. "Why?"

"They didn't say that either," the scientist said, with a frown of his own. Then they all looked at Davros, who was now loudly protesting the medic's ministrations. Nyder clasped his hands behind his back and stalked over, like a particularly large and sinister black insect.

"I'm perfectly capable of walking on this," snapped Davros. "Immobilization is unnecessary!"

"The ankle joint is shattered, and so are multiple carpals, Davros! If you walk on that, the pain will be excruciating, you'll be risking permanent damage, infection, amputation-"

"Do you think you can tell me anything about pain?" Davros pierced the medic with a glare - and then raised his head, as Nyder bent over him.

Nyder's eyes were hard. "You are going to do as the medic requests, Davros." More softly he said, "You owe yourself that. And you owe me."

The two men stared at each other, and everyone watched, breathless. A sigh ran through the watchers when Davros looked away first.

"Do as you think best," Davros said to the medic, not looking at him. Nyder stood over them both, and did not look away.

"Commander," said Esselle, coming to his shoulder, "we can't get any vehicles from the Dome."

"Davros is wounded." Nyder was almost grinding his teeth with frustration. "We can't just leave him out here, he needs shelter and safety." Standard emergency procedures would have them relocate to the Dome, but not now, not when the Dome inhabitants were apparently all out for Davros' head.

"There is treaty between the Daughters and the Mutos, we could-"

"I am not taking Davros to the Mutos!" Nyder glared down at Esselle.

Instead of replying, she went over to the men working on the remote access panel. Pulling a bundle of wires from her pocket, she soon was accessing the Bunker security systems directly from her neural array.

"No Daleks in the entrance - Section One clear - Two clear - Three clear - all sections clear of Daleks." Her eyes were closed, but her mouth pursed in something between a pout and a frown. "No sign that the feed is faked."

In a deadly soft voice, Nyder asked, "And since when can you remotely access the Bunker Security camera systems - Liaison?"

"Since I had the code-keys for the Security overrides memorised from your files," she said shortly, her eyes still closed. "Random audio feed - feedback and echoes normal. Random light sequencing - normal."

"What are you doing?"

"The Daleks could override the security system, have it send out video feed of an empty Bunker - but they wouldn't have recordings of me making the lights blink and the audio system stutter. Therefore, they are gone. And," her eyes rolled behind her closed lids, "their structural changes have not progressed below the lowest level. The Bunker is still habitable. And defendable."

"Is the Bunker safer than the Dome, though?"

"The Dome is full of angry Kaleds, the Bunker is empty." Esselle's eyes rose to his. "We will of course do as you command."

Nyder looked at her carefully, but detected no sarcasm. "The Bunker. It's closer. And if the Daleks are gone, their jamming equipment may be gone as well. Break out the disintegrators."

The Daughters started to assemble their weapons, while Davros sat on the ground and shivered. Under the shaking of his body, a determination was fighting, fighting to speak. He raised his hand in a gesture, and Esselle shoved the half-assembled disintegrator into the hands of the woman beside her, and came to kneel at Davros' side.

"What can I do to reverse - what I have done? Now?" Davros touched his head, as though to show the location of his wounds, inside.

"Give yourself time. You can't just will this away, Davros, any more than understanding how your foot was broken will let you walk on it without further damage."

"No. I need - something, now. Not anything permanent, but - I need to correct the impression that I have given. Maintain my status among the Kaled people. I can't just lose myself in my - my sickness. Not now!"

She cocked her head and looked at him cynically. Cutting her eyes at the medic, she suggested, "Blood change?"

"Wouldn't neutralise the drugs that have already crossed the blood-brain barrier," he objected, rolling up his bandages and putting them away. "He's taken too many things at once to risk using antagonists."

"Do we have enough whole blood of Davros' type in stock in the Bunker to do a blood change?"

"Always, it's part of the standard stock."

"The Daleks might have set traps in the Bunker," objected Davros.

"Unlikely - they want you alive."

"No sign of anything moving," said one of the sentries from the low hill overhead. "The path to the Dome and to the Bunker looks clear."

"Back to the Bunker, then." Davros grabbed hold of Esselle's shoulder and ordered, "Help me up." Without reply, she stood, bearing his weight up, until he stood balanced on one foot. The other one was strapped into a rigid fibreglass shell, with bandages peeking around the edges.

"Nyder. Help me." He didn't want any of the other touching him. He didn't want anyone touching him; his skin crawled at the thought. But he fought the sensation away, with the stubborn will of a centuries-old determination. He had to hang on. Just a little bit longer, and then he could let go.

The medics unfolded a clever collapsible stretcher (part of the standard evacuation kit), and Nyder helped Davros onto it. The tiny group of scientists and guards headed back towards the Bunker, a string of figures in black and white moving over the white terrain. A few shouted signals, and two Daughters appeared at the end of the string, dragging the limp form of Ferr behind them.

* * *

The first thing the Doctor and Leela saw inside the Dome was a plain concrete hallway that seemed to run to the horizon. Just inside the hallway, there was a large computer console, and sitting at it was a familiar figure.

"Gharman!" said the Doctor gladly, as he retrieved his scarf from Leela. "I was wondering where you were."

"What's happening at the Bunker?" Gharman said; there was a cable running to his neural relay from the computer, and his eyes were staring as though blind as he sent and received data. "The automated power plant alarum went off-"

"The Bunker's been evacuated. Of those few people who remained." The Doctor waved one hand in front of Gharman, who blinked and focussed back on the world around him.

"We had to leave, the Daleks were getting more and more aggressive!" protested Gharman. "We tried to get to Davros, but the Daleks drove us back-"

"Well, last we saw, the Daleks were starting to disassemble the Bunker itself," said the Doctor. "Davros was definitely evacuated, along with the remaining Reflectionists and the Prime."

"But their leader went mad," said Leela. "And the Prime killed her."

Gharman's shoulders slumped. "Now they  are killing each other - I  sometimes think that Ska ro is cursed, cursed to unending war." He shook himself, and stood. "I've been asked to meet Councillor Mah here, and then go to an emergency meeting of the Council. Would you come with me? You are probably the last person to see Davros and the Bunker."

"And Security Liaison," said a man in an official-looking robe, whose face was marked by both responsibility and exhaustion. He strode up to the console, and looked at the bizarrely dressed figure in front of it with a curious expression.

"Councillor Mah," said Gharman. "This is the Doctor."

"The - infamous Doctor? The alien who came to warn us about the Daleks - and failed." Mah looked grim for a moment. "We should have believed you: the Daleks are just too powerful, once Davros took control of them, there was no stopping him."

"I'm not certain that he does have control of them," said the Doctor. "In my own admittedly excellent opinion, Davros is in dire need of psychiatric care."

Mah shook his head. "Our psych techs are not well-trained. For generations their only task has been to heal men enough to get them back onto the battlefields. There are new students, new techniques being taught, but I don't know who I could detail to work with Davros." Then Mah cast a considering look on the Doctor. "I don't suppose?"

"What?" The Doctor's eyes widened at the thought of being considered for the role of Davros' psychiatrist. He admitted to himself that the thought tempted him, and then regretfully pushed the temptation aside. "Well, no. My medical degree is purely honorary, and I don't think my previous interactions with Davros have been the sort that would let him see me as an unbiased authority, when it comes to his mental health."

"Good point," said Gharman thoughtfully.

Mah shrugged his acceptance of this. "The meeting will begin within the hour. Doctor, your viewpoint would be most valued-"

"Of course, of course. And Leela-" and the Doctor looked around. "Leela?"

There was no sign of his companion. Except for the Doctor and the two Kaled men, the concrete hallway was deserted as far as the eye could see.


	19. Thunder

The Elite evacuees went down the tunnel to the Bunker one turn at a time, leaving Ferr outside under guard. Nyder insisted on scanning every metre of the walls as the group moved, looking for concealed explosives, tripwires, or other traps. The Daleks could move with blinding precision and efficiency when they chose to; they could have tampered with anything.

There was nothing as far as the main Bunker entrance. That looked just the same as always, plain metal walls, security equipment. Nyder ordered Davros put down, and everyone else to wait, while the Bunker computers were accessed.

"It seems clean," said one of the Daughters, scanning the computer. "No signs of new subroutines. Security systems show no unknown energy sources in the Bunker itself."

"I won't risk it," said Esselle. "Make a copy of the current updates into one of the auxiliary machines. Then power that machine off. Revert the main systems to the most recent backup."

"My precipitate readings!" wailed one of the Elite scientists. "All my work!"

Esselle suggested a very obscene usage for precipitate under her breath, then inhaled and said, "You can review your data from the backup machine, off the network."

Davros was sitting on the main security desk, having no interest in lying on the floor. "I can't imagine all this is necessary," he said, getting up and limping towards the open main doors into the Bunker interior. "The Daleks have left."

"Don't WALK on that!" snapped Esselle, turning and pointing at Davros' broken foot.

"Davros, you can't-" said Nyder, and heard the faintest grinding from the inner doorway. Davros had just stepped over the threshold, and Nyder lunged towards him.

The door moved, far faster than it should have. It hit Nyder hard enough on the arm to numb it from the shoulder down. He lunged, grabbing Davros and shoving him ahead of him.

The door didn't cut them in half as it thudded home. Instead, it left them inside the Bunker corridor - and everyone else outside.

"Now what?" said Davros, staring over his shoulder at the closed door. Nyder hit the controls fruitlessly. He banged on the door twice with his fist, and faintly heard Esselle shout, "Are you all right?"

"So far," said Nyder, looking down the corridor. A Dalek contained an incredible amount of energy, it was unlikely that one of them could have gone undetected by the security scanners - but what if one of them had powered down to the barest minimum, and waited for the returnees before drawing from the Bunker systems to recharge? He should have told them to lock down the Bunker systems, not allow sudden power drains.

"Is someone here?" said Davros, scowling. "I thought I heard something."

Nyder listened, and heard nothing. He stood perfectly still, one hand on Davros' arm to help him balance, and held his breath, listening more carefully. There was a muttering off in the distance, but it didn't sound like a person in the corridor. Nyder had lived down here for years; he knew every trick of echo that the Bunker walls could create. This was coming from -

"It's coming from the intercom system," said Davros, looking up.

It was a mechanical murmuring right at the limit of hearing. They both strained, trying to decipher the words. Then the volume crept up, loud enough for the two men to identify the nature of the voices.

They were Dalek voices.

Davros, the voices whispered. You are weak. You are damaged. You should change. You should be strong. Davros. You should be protected. You should be one of us. Join us Davros. Join us and be all-powerful. Join us and rule us. Join us. Join the Daleks. Become a Dalek. Join us.

The words blurred and overlapped, multiple voices whispering at once. Nyder's voice cut through them as he ordered, "Don't listen to them, Davros."

"Why would I?" said Davros, raising his nose a fraction in the air. "No sane man would-" and he paused.

"Exactly." Nyder's voice was flat. "But an imbalanced man, isolated and alone, listening to that for hours on hours…"

"Computer activity, Commander!" said Esselle from the other side of the door. "Your orders?"

"Shut it down; crash the systems if you have to."

As though in reaction to Esselle's words, the voices suddenly jumped in volume, loud enough now to make speech impossible. Then again and now the voices were roaring, thundering, loud enough to hurt.

DAVROS. JOIN US. DAVROS. JOIN US. DAVROS. JOIN US.

Davros clamped his hands over his ears, grimacing in pain. The voices were so loud that he thought he could feel the air shake with each syllable. Nyder grimaced as well, and then clamped his own hands over Davros', giving the other man's ears two layers of protection.

Davros looked at Nyder, startled. It was too loud to speak, but each of them could lip-read expertly; so Nyder mouthed, Davros, don't listen to them!

Nyder, said Davros' lips. Whatever real sound they might be making was drowned in the booming Dalek voices.

YOU WILL JOIN US. YOU WILL JOIN US. YOUWILLJOINUSJOINUSJOINUS

Nyder flinched with every syllable; he thought that he could actually feel his eardrums cracking with the pain. He wondered if this would permanently damage his hearing, but his hands remained tight to the sides of Davros' head, protecting him. He felt like his own ears were ready to bleed.

Davros was suddenly fighting Nyder's grasp, trying to pull his hands free. Nyder fought back, panicked, certain that Davros would be deafened if he uncovered his ears. But Davros slipped his hands out from Nyder's dusty gloved palms and instantly clapped them over Nyder's ears. They stood there, each of them holding the other's head in their hands.

The horrible roaring shouts became a softer thunder, then suddenly stuttered and stopped. The two men froze, and then each raised their hands up the merest fraction from the other, waiting to hear if the hideous chant would start again. But it didn't.

There was the sound of the doors being cranked open (it sounded wrong, muffled and blurred in their ears). Before the door was completely open, Esselle squeezed through, seeming to pour through the gap like black water. There was a disintegrator in one hand, and a blaster in the other. "Are you all right?" she panted.

"Yes," said Nyder, too loudly he thought - he could barely hear himself speak. "Davros?"

"Fine," he said, shaking his head. "Just a bit - ear-numb, as it were."

"The Daleks apparently set the computer systems to isolate Davros, and then broadcast audio messages tailored for his condition," said Nyder tightly.

"Yes, they told us."

"They what?"

"The Daleks sent a message while we were prying the door open, saying that they had set the trap, and apologising. They even sent instructions for turning it off."

"Why?"

"Excellent question, Commander. I hope we can find an excellent answer."

"For now," said Davros, "I need a chair. My chair, preferably. Get the medic in here, check for aural damage, start heating up my banked donations for the blood exchange. And test a communications channel to the Dome."

"Yes, sir," Nyder and Esselle said in unison.

* * *

Leela had wandered down a side passage and found a young man cowering beside a large open door. He was muttering to himself, listening to the music and the sounds of conversation coming through the doorway, and never heard the silent tread of the huntress coming up behind her.

"They said I was old enough," the man said to himself. "I've done all the lessons; everyone else in my class has gone. There's nothing to be afraid of in there except-"

"Except what?" said Leela, putting her hand to her knife. The man turned, and flushed red.

"Women!" he squeaked, and hesitated, then gave up and dashed through the doorway. Leela followed, curious as to what was inside.

* * *

"Where can that girl have gone?" scowled the Doctor.

"Well, she can't have gone far on foot. Don't worry Doctor, she's perfectly safe."

"But are you safe from her?" wondered the Doctor pessimistically.

Gharman snapped his fingers. "I'll bet she's in the Dance." The capitalisation was obvious from his tone.

"We could be hours finding her," scowled Mah. "The meeting starts very soon, we still have to get to the Council chambers-"

"Fine, go ahead and I'll follow as soon as I can. Gharman, show me where she is."

Gharman led the Doctor down a side hallway, talking as he went. "I don't know if there's anything else like this out there."

"Out there?"

"On other worlds. They say that some Kaleds started dancing the hour the War ended. I've never been here and had the Dance room be completely empty. It isn't law, but it is our custom."

The two men stepped through an open doorway, and into the Dance.

It was a vast room, large enough that the far walls were lost in shadow. There were tables here and there, clusters of chairs. And around them, filling the room with movement and noise were dancers. The majority were young men; very few looked even as old as Gharman.

There was no apparent pattern to the Dance; the music was mostly percussion, and everyone just seemed to move along with it. The Doctor winced at how many of those young men were scarred, wounded. Too many of them showed artificial limbs, implanted vision systems, scars and burns, the mark of a dead war still living on them.

"We'd better split up," Gharman half-shouted in the Doctor's ear over the music. "She should be easy enough to spot. I'll take this side."

"I'll take the other side," said the Doctor, turning and moving into the dancers. He was ready to jump back at the first sign of aggression, but instead he was greeted with smiles, gestures of curiosity. He asked man after man if they'd seen a woman in brown leather, but they all nodded no. Several of them stuck their elbows out towards him, which was apparently an invitation to dance; the Doctor politely declined, and went on.

He circled through the mass of dancers, and almost against his will his feet started to take on the rhythm of the music. It made it easier to get through them, he told himself. He didn't dance. But there was something very joyful about this music and this dance. He saw several women, wearing long white robes with coloured sashes; each of them surrounded by attentive male dancers. They smiled, and tried to see that every man had a turn on her arm.

There were other people sitting in the chairs and couches around the edges, talking, drinking. Courting even, flirting with words and touch. Embracing, sobbing: were these lovers being parted by the evacuation? The Doctor couldn't see Leela sitting down anywhere, so he turned back and plunged into the midst of the dancers.

The Doctor had studied Skaro and its people, and their terrible descendants, the Daleks. Always the Kaleds had been a cold and brittle foreword, a passing mention of a race of soldiers who were wiped out by their own creations. But now he saw them as a living people. Here, alive, in this room, were the Kaled people, and even if they were going to be driven from their homes tomorrow, right now they would gather and dance.

They danced the end of the War, they danced survival, and they danced life. How they danced! Alone and together, elbow to elbow or arm in arm, in lines and circles and pairs, they danced. And almost against his will, the stranger among them started to move to the same beat.

And then he found Leela.

There was a stage at one end of the hall, raised from the floor by only a few centimetres. It was flanked on both sides by long tables covered with musical instruments: apparently anyone could walk up and start playing along. Right now there were several wailing horns winding around the music of a massive drum. The drum looked to be ex-military issue, with logos that had been crudely blotted out with paint. It was like a great black bowl of thunder, and the thunder boomed and crackled in the hands of the drummer.

Leela, face shimmering with sweat, her face and her body alight with excitement, played the great drum with two heavy mallets. She had her own audience: men and women who danced before her, moved their bodies to the beat she sent out. The flashing of her brown hands seemed to control the Doctor's heartbeats as he moved closer.

He smiled. There was something so totally human and vital about her there, eyes flashing, glorying in the music throbbing from the drum. Something totally passionate and alive.

Leela saw the Doctor and shouted his name. Beating faster with one mallet, she flipped the other one expertly in her hand and offered it to him-handle-first. Inviting him to join her on the stage, to drum and to dance, to feel the beat of life and be a part of it.

The Doctor reached out and touched the mallet, and there was a sudden squeal of noise from overhead. Giant vidscreens that lined the walls of the room suddenly flickered alive, and everyone showed a man: the same man. A man with dark hair and eyes that knew too much, in a white tunic that seemed half-military, half-medical.

The dancers paused in disarray. The drum was silenced, and the wailing horns flattened out and died. A name was whispered, by the crowd, by the Doctor, by Leela, by Gharman across the room, by Mah and the councillors in their chamber.

Davros.

"People of Skaro," said Davros gravely. "Survivors of the Great War. We are here, today, and we are alive. But we all bear the scars of that war."

Around the Doctor, the crowd was still and silent. Leela stepped off the stage and joined the Doctor, as he watched the screens.

"I," Davros touched his chest, "I too bear those scars. Even in this new body, I still have scars - here." And he touched his head. "I have been too willing to ignore those wounds, that damage to myself. But despite all the efforts of those around me, those wounds started to have their effect. On me."

The crowd of Kaleds murmured, and Gharman moved through them to the Doctor's side. "What's he doing?" he asked.

"The effect of those wounds may have been unnoticed by me, but not by others. There was someone else. Someone who knew that I was wounded, and plotted to take advantage of it. Someone who has manipulated me, and the Daleks, to their own ends, their own desire. Their desire to change and to destroy us, our society, even Skaro itself!"

The Doctor was getting more and more anxious as Davros' voice rose. Around him were men and women with clenched fists, bared teeth: if Davros denounced someone in particular, say a certain pair of travelling aliens, he and Leela would have only the slimmest chance of escape.

"I am," Davros paused, "ashamed because it is someone who was only here because of myself. Who was only able to commit these crimes because of myself."

The Doctor leaned over and whispered, "Get ready to run. Head for those doors behind the stage." The doors were narrow, if there was a way they could block them, lose their pursuers in the Dome passages, maybe they could get outside.

Davros sighed on the screen, and slumped a little. He looked down and then up, his eyes more tired and miserable than ever.

"The one who did these things, committed these crimes, is Ferr."

Ferr, the crowd repeated over and over, in a flurry of whispers. "Ferr? General Ferr?" asked Gharman, to no one in particular.

"Like myself, Ferr was given a new body, had his mind and personality transplanted via a neural array." Davros touched his head, showed one of the gleaming metal discs set into his scalp. "But he was more mentally damaged than anyone realised. Even myself. He is directly responsible for the deaths of several Daughters of Skaro, and for a near-fatal attack on myself. He is the one who took advantage of my confused state, tricked me into trying to expel the Daughters of Skaro."

The crowd growled; the Doctor fancied that he could hear that growl echoing through the Dome.

"And he will be punished. He will never harm anyone again. That is my promise to you."

Davros leaned forward. "And I must make another promise. That I will not allow my weakness to interfere with my responsibilities to you. Therefore, I am asking you to accept my temporary resignation from the Kaled Council." He smiled suddenly, a faint smile but still a smile. "I am asking you before I inform the Council, in fact. Won't they be surprised."

A smattering of laughter from the watchers.

"And I will be seeking counselling of my own, with the psych techs. When they have given me a clean statement of health, I would be honoured to petition you, the Kaled people, to let me return as one of your leaders." He bent his head, his lashes sweeping down over his eyes. "I thank you." And the screens went dark.

* * *

When the Doctor and Leela finally arrived at the Council chamber, their news was rather out of date. They were in fact completely overlooked, as the Councillors grimly discussed the political results of Davros stepping down. Mah was there, trying to keep control of the meeting.

He said forcefully, "Davros is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the government! There is no reason why this Council, working together, should not be able to handle things until he is well enough to return!"

The Councillors did not look convinced. The sole woman Councillor said, "Davros has great symbolic value to the Kaled people. His stepping down, his admitting that he is not well…"

"Will be invaluable in encouraging other citizens to visit the psych techs!" A third Councillor ran his fingers through his hair. "We've always had problems, because of the techniques that they used during the war to force-condition men and get them back on the battlefield. But that's over now. Our psych techs are here to heal minds, and if even Davros is willing to admit he needs them, we can get thousands of veterans to accept the counselling they need!"

The Doctor looked at the Councillors, and noticed one man who didn't seem to belong. He was wearing green coveralls rather than white robes, and a stubby rod projected up from the back of his left upper arm, holding a small green flag above his blond head.

"Who is that?" the Doctor asked.

"A Thal emissary, sent here on the news that Davros was purging the Reflectionists," Gharman said softly. "Some of them are supposed to be telepathic…"

The Thal turned and looked straight at Gharman, and arched one eyebrow inquisitively. It was as though he had heard what Gharman had said - which of course he couldn't have. At least not with his ears.

"You can't seriously believe that Davros would voluntarily give up power," said the Doctor, stepping forward and putting his hands on the table. "Davros is mentally ill. Monomaniacal. Obsessed with control and domination. I have no idea if General Ferr is even involved in whatever scheme Davros is planning. And-" He stared at the Councillors, who all seemed to be looking at something behind the Doctor.

There was a single dry cough.

The Doctor looked over his shoulder, and saw a vidscreen in the wall. Of course. Nyder and Esselle flanked Davros, still sitting in his chair. All three of them were looking at the Doctor with distinctly chill expressions.

"I am giving up power temporarily," said Davros. "It is the necessary thing. I have a full record of Ferr attacking me and admitting to his insane plans. I trust that my evidence, and my word, should be weighed more heavily than that of some traveller."

"You should have told us, you should have discussed it with us!" said one of the Councillors.

Davros replied, "It was not until Ferr was captured, only hours ago, that I realised how far I had fallen. I had to make it clear, completely and irrevocably, that I understood my condition and that I would take steps to correct it. I have every faith, Councillors, in your abilities to run this government without me." There was a faint hint of sarcasm woven in with those words. His eyes swept the Council, and then focussed back on the Time Lord.

"Doctor," said Davros. "There's a message for you. Nyder, the video feed-"

The picture jumped. Davros vanished, and was replaced by the squat shape of a Dalek. A Dalek who began to shout as soon as it saw the Doctor, waving one sucker arm which held a flat metal plate. There were letters stencilled on that plate, and as the Dalek continued to wave and shout, the Doctor realised that the letters were in English.

It read K-9. It was a part of K-9's casing.

"Your spy has been captured!" the Dalek shouted triumphantly. "We have your slave as our prisoner!"

"K-9 is not a spy," said the Doctor exasperatedly.

"The slave is of value to you?" Then the Dalek paused, and seemed to look around at the floor around it; there was a strange organic burbling and meeping from somewhere out of sight. The Dalek looked back at the camera. "Then you will come, you and your companion, to Dal to retrieve your property. Now." The picture vanished, with a dramatic pop.

The people in the chamber all turned and stared at the Doctor and Leela. Their expressions were varied: confused, angry, fearful, curious.

"Well then." The Doctor swallowed. "I believe we have an appointment."


	20. The City of the Daleks

Ferr was still outside the Bunker. His wounds had been attended to, although he was not going to be walking or raising his arms above the shoulder for a long time. He was currently winding up an extremely well-reasoned and sincere argument with Executioner as to why he should be released. His dignity was a bit impaired by being handcuffed to an eyebolt set in the solid rock, but his face and posture all oozed rationality.

Executioner waited until he ran out of breath, and then picked up a small bucket that was sitting on the ground beside her.

"What's that?" he asked, smiling politely.

"Tar. Or to be more accurate, room-temperature-hardening opaque polymer. I was a Leader once, Ferr, and so I have knowledge that my sisters do not. Memories of mental illness devastating entire planetary populations, moving from mind to mind just as virii move from body to body. That is not going to happen here.

Ferr protested, but two more Daughters came to help hold him down while his head was covered with the sticky black goo. It did harden rather promptly, sealing his neural array under a layer of non-conductive plastic. Now he would not be able to link his mind to others.

"If only we had some feathers," said one of the Daughters wistfully.

"Let's not get too traditional," murmured Executioner. "Who's there?"

Someone was walking towards them; it was Kravos, one of the Bunker guards, a beaming smile lighting up his more-than-handsome face. He stood in front of the odd little group and just smiled.

Executioner tipped her head a bit to one side, and said quietly, "There's a hair on your uniform, Kravos."

"Oh?" he said, looking down and scuffing at himself. Executioner reached out and plucked up the end of the hair, and pulled. And pulled. And pulled. When finally pulled free, the hair was nearly as long as she was tall, and a bright orangey-red.

"I presume that explains why you're in such a good mood," she said. "The Prime Mother is back to her usual tricks." Then they all giggled together, even Kravos. Ferr did not; instead he concentrated on looking as innocent as possible.

* * *

Davros slumped in his chair. Beside him, the med tech was just finishing up on the transfusion, testing the last of the extracted blood for chemicals. Davros' head nodded, shallowly and slowly, as he tried to summon up the energy to do what came next. It had to be done, it should be done, but it felt an inconceivable burden just to speak, just to look up at the attentive Nyder and Esselle.

"I need to," Davros stopped and just breathed for a moment, "locate the Doctor's travel machine. I want to see it uncovered. Tonight."

"That could be dangerous, Davros," Esselle objected. "Whether or not the Doctor survives his trip to Dal, it will be difficult to take control of his machine."

"How do you know that?" asked Nyder.

"Let us say that the Reflectionists have prior information on the Doctor's equipment."

Davros interrupted. "I want to see it - with my own eyes. Before he leaves. Even if it means nothing to me now…someday I will want to remember it. Someday it will mean something to me."

Esselle's heart cringed at the defeat in her leader's voice. Her voice was calm and approving, revealing nothing of her feelings. "As you wish." She leaned over and stared into Davros' eyes. "May I ask, sir, when you last ate?"

"Ate?" Davros tried to think. "I - can't remember."

Esselle and Nyder shared a look of extreme peevishness, before arranging for an outside guard detail, and sensor sweeps to find the Doctor's machine. And a meal, which they would grimly force Davros to eat, down to the last food pill, and patiently stand watch to make sure his abused system didn't reject it.

* * *

The Kaled politicians had very little interest in talking any further to the Doctor; instead they were frantically trying to decide how to persuade the people who had fled the Dome to return. Gharman left to arrange a meeting of the Bunker scientists, so that they could take a private vote on returning to their previous home.

So Leela and the Doctor were quite alone when they left the Dome and headed towards the Dalek city, Dal. They were an inconvenient distance away when the Doctor stopped and insisted they both put on the radiation suits.

"Why?" asked Leela, pulling the heavy hood over her head. 'They're hot."

"So is that city." The Doctor held up one of the bucket-sized portable particle fountains they had been given; the glass column that ran up the middle of it crawled with multicoloured lights. "Radiation, even at this distance."

They were following a flat surface, all overgrown with the fungus. It was probably an old road leading to the city. The even footing let the Doctor concentrate on what they might find there before they came to Dal.

Why would the Daleks be so determined to bring him to their city? They definitely remembered his previous, ill-fated attempt to blow up their incubation chamber. The Reflectionists might have given them even more information on how the Doctor had fought the Daleks across time and space.

He looked; off in the distance, he could see a shallow lake. He remembered that lake from a previous visit to a blasted Skaro. Yes, that meant the city should be just ahead there - but it wasn't.

It should be a low assembly of buildings, broken and cracked by time. But instead the fungus just seemed to run off to an edge, and stop. A cliff? A pit? From that edge came a glowing golden light, and noise, barely muffled by the radiation suit hood. The noises of machines, each one working and humming and ticking and hammering. And were some of those mechanical noises the voices of the Daleks themselves? Giving orders, shouting commands?

The Doctor's feet slowed, and finally stopped. Leela stood at his side, her knife held a bit clumsily in her gloved hand. "You've been here before. Is this the best way in?" she wondered.

"They want us in, no doubt about that," said the Doctor pessimistically. "Perhaps this is a test, to see how far we are willing to go to save K-9. Or a maze, a series of intelligence tests to measure us as adversaries."

"I don't suppose you know where there is a back door?" asked Leela.

"No," said the Doctor. He stepped forward. Another step. He kept moving on, step by step, each step seeming harder than the last. Leela paced beside him, alert for any hostile movement. But there was nothing: just the flat fungus-covered road, the low hills on each side, and the edge where the road ended.

The Doctor held his hand over his head, and saw light flash golden on it from whatever was hidden by that edge. The particle fountains that he and Leela still carried were as bright as tiny suns, frantically absorbing radiation and turning it into light. Finally they took the last step, and looked at Dal.

They looked down.

And down.

Dal was gone. The Daleks had consumed it. Changed it, converted it, and burrowed hundreds of metres into the bedrock of Skaro, to build their new Dal. The travellers looked down into the pit.

Dal was a single enormous machine, every part of it  seeming to slide or move or rotate. Steam rose from it; the Doctor could see an endless waterfall that streamed into the pit - from the lake, perhaps. It was a factory and a metal-works and an armoury, and it was as delicate as a pocket watch and as brutal as an  abattoir,  all a t once.

It glowed: glowed with energy and power and radiation. The physical heat was palpable even through the radiation suits; a steady breeze of air whistled past them. The golden light of Dal shone on their faces through the leaded visors. The noise of it shook the air around them, beat against their ears with metal fists.

And in that city-machine were Daleks.

Daleks everywhere! Moving in single file, working on machines, shifting heavy pieces of equipment, rolling side by side in a grotesque parody of strolling couples. As far as the eye could discern, every flat surface of the city seemed to have Daleks on it. And the Daleks were both master and part of the great machine Dal. Their motions seemed as much a part of the city as its humming turbines, its streaming conveyer belts, its flaming refineries. They and the machine were one.

The two travellers paused, daunted. There seemed to be no way down into the pit; the road they stood on came to an end, and below them were only endless planes of sheer rock interlaced with more machines. Their eyes returned again and again to the great moving city before them. It was enough to stop the breath.

Then the city stopped, and their breath did too.

Every pounding piston and thundering flywheel and throbbing engine paused, and silence welled out of the pit. The city-machine seemed to hover in the midst of its grim labour, like a guillotine about to fall. And every Dalek turned its round body towards the rim of the pit, and stared up at the two tiny silver-clad figures at the rim. Thousands, tens of thousands of Daleks, each one with its eyestalk like a single accusing finger, staring at the Doctor.

The Doctor swore he could feel his hair curl tighter under the force of that regard. He stepped backwards involuntarily, then another step. Out of sight, the sounds of the Dalek city started again.

"It's hopeless," he said.

"No!" said Leela. "We cannot give up!"

"It's a trap. It's got to be a trap. They're all waiting for me, a whole city of them. Who know how long they've been planning, what they have waiting. If," he paused, "if I lead you into that, I could never forgive myself. You have to stay here, Leela."

"But I want to help! You cannot fight these machine-people!"

"Well neither can you!" snapped the Doctor.

There was a faint noise from the edge of the pit. Something like a twittering bird, or a squeaking - something. And with that noise was a familiar voice.

"Master," said K-9, as he was lofted to the edge of the pit by a small levitating platform.

"K-9!" said the Doctor, his face igniting in a smile - and then he stopped. There were things on the platform with K-9, things that flopped along at his side as the mechanical dog rolled off the platform and onto the road. Things without shape, with too many tentacles and not enough eyes. The Doctor had seen things like that before.

They were infant Daleks. Their organic components at least, before they were permanently armoured and imprisoned in their distinctive casings. Actually he had no idea if they were infants or full-grown: Daleks were notoriously leery of leaving their casings.

The particle fountains flamed again, and the Doctor immediately put one down on top of K-9, letting it absorb the ambient radiation that had probably contaminated his metal. The casing part that had been removed by the Daleks had been put back, although the cruel hole left by their spike was still there. The Doctor was a bit more concerned about the infant Daleks. He knew that they were tough, incredibly tough, and very strong for their size.

"Don't touch them!" he hissed at Leela.

One of the little globs rolled, or slid, close to the Doctor. It raised one tendril and prodded at his foot, clad in its silvery radiation foil. The creature seemed to ooze backwards, angled its body as though looking, though this one had no eyes.

Then it made a noise.

"Ikki-ikki-ikki."

The Doctor swayed, remembering. Something that Esselle had said. He put out his foot, heel firmly in the fungus and toe a little bit raised, and the Dalek child crawled on top. It wasn't much larger than his foot really; they were so tiny at this stage. Hard to imagine this little pip of flesh as being an invincible battle machine someday.

Slowly, the Doctor raised his toe, and lowered it. Then again, faster and faster, bouncing the Dalek up and down the way you would jog an infant on your knee.

And the Dalek squealed, waving its tiny black-and-green tendrils in frenzy. It chirruped with every sign of glee. And the other watching globs whistled and chirped as well.

"Doctor," said Leela urgently, and the Doctor looked up. There were more levitation platforms coming into sight, and these held Daleks. Fully encased Daleks, the light of Dal gleaming off them, their weapons ready, staring at the sight of their ancient enemy with one of their children getting a footy-top-ride.

"I think we should go now," the Doctor understated. He carefully laid his foot flat, and after a last somewhat sticky embrace of his ankle (the Doctor could hear the Dalek slurping against the outside of the radiation suit) it hopped off. The Doctor stepped backwards, and Leela and K-9 came after him. But as fascinated as he was by the sight of the Daleks swarming to the edge of the city, arraying themselves at the end of the road, a part of him was also completely and irrationally captivated by the sight of the tiny uncased Daleks, all in a little heap, waving at him. Waving with every tendril and tentacle they possessed, until they were hidden by a gentle swell in the road.

* * *

The trip away from Dal was easy. The road ran straight and smooth. If it weren't for the Dalek, it would have been a pleasant stroll through the monotone landscape of Skaro.

But the Dalek was there. One Dalek. It followed well behind the Doctor and his companions, but whenever they looked back, it was there: grey and black and squat, shadowing their movements. And when their path left the road and veered towards the Kaled Dome, it was suddenly in front of them, waiting.

"What does it want?" asked Leela.

The Doctor's mind was still gingerly nibbling away at the sight of the transformed Dal, trying to get it to fit with what he knew about Daleks. "It wants us to stay away from the Dome, apparently."

"Then where does it want us to go?"

"It wants us to go - this way." And inevitably enough, despite the Doctor's dodging and Leela's feints and K-9's brave little charges, the three of them were herded to the entrance of the Bunker.

The Dalek was closer now, close enough that the Doctor could see that there was something - wrong about it. Something different about its outline against the sky. As soon as the three of them were inside the tunnel and out of the Dalek's line of sight, he hissed "Move!" and the three of them did.

"Present identifi-" said an intercom overhead.

"Just stopping by again!" said the Doctor, zipping past the intercom. There was another one at the next bend of the tunnel, and he shouted at it, "Looking for some-"

"-fungus repellent-"

"-so we can leave!" he finished up, standing at the door to the Bunker proper. K-9 slid to a stop beside him, and Leela stayed one pace behind.

"I can hear it in the tunnel behind us, Doctor," she said.

"Ah, and if you don't mind, there's a Dalek coming down the tunnel after us, so if you could let us in and set up your disintegrators, perhaps you could convince it to knock first?" The Doctor smiled up at the camera over the door for a long moment, and then the door opened.

The three travellers were hustled inside and up against the wall; K-9 gave an electronic growl as he was forced rear-first against the metal. "Scan them later," ordered Tane. "Get the weapons in place!"

There was a soft gonging noise at the door. Tane stared at it, incredulous.

The gonging noise was repeated. It was like something was plucking at the door, or brushing something metal against it. Or knocking. Tane touched a control on the desk in front of him, and said in a remarkably level tone, "Present identification and state the nature of your business."

The unmistakable voice of a Dalek came over the intercom. "I am a Dalek emissary from Dal. I am here to consult with the Kaled Elite regarding an irregularity in our breeding program. I petition Commander Nyder to allow me entrance."

"That's not right," said Tane, frowning, his hand on the control muting the audio feed. "Davros is in command here, why do they ask for Nyder?" Then he touched the control again. "I will relay your request."

"Don't do it, Tane," said the Doctor. "If you let the Daleks at Davros, in his weakened condition-"

Tane's eyes narrowed. "You are not in command here. I will relay the request to Davros and Nyder. If they both agree, I have to let it in."

"Then let me persuade them otherwise!"

"How do I know you aren't working with Ferr?" he said suspiciously.

"Would this face lie?" said the Doctor, allowing innocence to practically drip from his voice and expression.

Tane did not look convinced. He touched another control on his desk, and told Davros of the Doctor's arrival, and the Dalek's. After a pause and a muttered conversation, orders were given: the Doctor and his companions were to be brought to Davros' office, and the Dalek was to be sent in afterwards, under guard. Two Daughters came popping out of their passageways and took up a stance in the main entrance, disintegrator guns linked to their neural arrays by the usual spray of cables. Only when the Doctor, Leela and K-9 had been scanned and sent into the Bunker did Tane open the main door.

The Dalek came through hesitantly, its dome frantically swivelling as it looked around the room. It had no arm. No arm, no weapon: a heavy metal plate had been bolted over the sockets in its front panel. Apparently it was unable to defend itself. "I am the emissary from Dal," it said, in a voice that was almost calm by Dalek standards. "Please allow me to speak to Davros."

* * *

Two twitchy-looking Security men escorted the travellers to Davros' office. Commander Nyder, wearing a damp green rubber apron over his usual uniform, met them in the hallway outside.

"Do I want to know why you're wearing that?" asked the Doctor, eyeing the apron warily.

"Probably not," replied Nyder, slipping it off and draping it neatly over one arm before opening the door.

Inside, Davros was sitting in front of the large vidscreen, in the chair rebuilt from his original support equipment. A heavy-looking fibreglass sheath or splint encased one of his feet. Cables snaked from his neural array to Esselle, and then to the screen.

Frozen on the vidscreen was the picture of a dark-haired man, pointing a large weapon, his mouth frozen in mid-snarl.

"Is that General Ferr?" asked the Doctor. "I only saw him once, but-"

"Yes," said Nyder, more nasally than ever. "He attacked Davros with a forbidden weapon of some sort. Davros will decide how much of the recording goes into the Justice archives."

"Shouldn't edit it at all," said Davros, glumly. A look of profound exhaustion lay over his sharp features, leaving them a little blurred

"We can't let the full recording go onto the public record. It's just the sort of technology that we don't want anyone tampering with - at least, that's what Executioner says," sighed Esselle. "I think we'll just have to enter in the still images, and say that the audio track is classified." She tilted her head in Nyder's direction. "How was the preliminary interrogation?"

Now the Doctor realised what the rubber apron reminded him of. Slaughterhouse equipment.

"Inconclusive," said Nyder, putting down the apron across a spare chair. "He's feeling everything I do to him, he just isn't - he isn't caring about it." Nyder's frustration showed for a moment in his voice.

"High order delusion," Esselle said, sounding as glum as Davros. "It will make the appropriate punishment - difficult."

"Surely he needs treatment, not punishment," objected the Doctor.

"We already gave him an entire new body," she snapped. "There are some limits to our generosity, and Ferr has exceeded them by attacking Davros."

Two Reflectionists walked into Davros' office, backwards. Each one trained the disintegrator she carried on the open door, through which the tiniest tip of a Dalek eyestalk peered.

"I ask for Commander Nyder's permission to enter," the Dalek stated.

Nyder stepped  in between Davros and the doorway, and then to be doubly sure put Esselle between him and the door. He calculated the position of the Security men and the Reflectionist women, and finally said, "Enter."

The Dalek rolled in; shockingly it was armless and weaponless, without even sockets to have limbs attached. The first thing it stared at was K-9; the little robot dog stared back up at it, the laser gun in its nose twitching back and forth. Then it focussed on the others in the office.

It approached Nyder, looked him deliberately up and down, and then said, "We have an error in our breeding program. Unless it is repaired, we will need to destroy the entire production run and start again. We require Davros' analysis of the data." It shifted a bit to one side, as though to see Davros directly, and Nyder shifted as well.

He frowned. "Davros is in no condition to help you. You should drop them into stasis until he is recovered."

"We will not put our entire future on hold waiting for him!" the Dalek said. Then it paused, and spoke more deliberately. "We believe that Davros can aid us. He is our creator. He will see what we cannot. He will see the flaw."

"What is the flaw?" asked Davros, invisible behind his two protectors.

The Dalek turned and stared down at K-9. "That is the flaw."

Davros leaned to one side in his chair, looking at the mechanical creature that the Doctor had brought with him. "That little robot? What does that have to do with your breeding program?"

"I promise you, any improper advances he's made must be due to radiation scrambling his circuits," said the Doctor, straight-faced. That straight face was hard to come by, with the image of K-9 pitching his woo to a Dalek in the forefront of his mind.

"This was captured," said the Dalek, advancing towards K-9. "It was given a command. And it did not disobey. The embryos, the proto-Daleks, they disobeyed. They left their confinement. They found this K-9, and they took it back to their incubation facility. And they, they, they-"

The Dalek spun to face the Doctor. "You sent your K-9 to contaminate us! To contaminate our children!"

"What exactly did it do to them?" asked Esselle, one eyebrow twitching upwards. "Did K-9, what, expose them to deviant philosophies?"

"They…they played with him."

"And?" Esselle coaxed.

"They have been played with already! They have had their ration; they do not need more attention, more diversion! They are children, they will obey, they will take orders, they will not want to-" and the Dalek paused. It paused because Esselle had turned bright pink and slid to her knees on the floor, her eyes dancing with emotion.

"Oh yes, that works splendidly!" she finally wheezed. "Children hungry for affection, and you tell them 'That's all for today' and they break out o f their rooms  and go looking for a playmate! And they find one!"

Nyder looked down irritably at the top of Esselle's head. The Doctor and Leela were also starting to laugh.

"They wanted someone to play with? And they took K-9?" said the Doctor.

"That's all? Why are you angry about something so silly?" asked Leela. She thought of children racing through her village, chasing insects, flowers wild in their hair; there was not much to connect them with the little wet lumps that had escorted K-9 to the edge of Dal, but children were children.

The Dalek shook. "They are to obey! They will take orders, they will be Daleks! Daleks obey or they are exterminated!"

"They wished to play," K-9 said, raising his head to stare up at the Dalek.

Esselle actually drummed her fists on the floor in an excess of merriment. "Just wait until they start staying out all hours!"

"Borrowing the family casing and bringing it back all…all…all dented!" the Doctor chortled, bending over as well and putting his hands on his knees.

"Dalek unit," Esselle finally said, rising to her feet with tears of laughter still on her cheeks. "You have in your city at least three generation-batches of Daleks: those raised by Davros and the Bunker Elite, those raised by Davros and the red Hexagon, and those raised only by yourselves. Tell me, Dalek, of those three, which is the best? Which is the most flexible, the most curious, the most creative, the most powerful?"

The Dalek's eyestalk drooped in a parody of unhappiness. Its voice was low as it grated, "Yours are the best Daleks."

"They are not ours," she corrected. "They are you, a part of you. They are their own. Children never turn out just as you've planned. You can logically decide that they only need X amount of cuddling a day, and they will just up and demand more, more, more!"

"And the Kaleds, are they your children?" said the Dalek.

"Oh, I'm the wicked, wicked, wicked step-mother, who made them put away all their toys, learn their lessons and wash behind their ears." She blotted her tears away on her sleeve. "But I have great hopes for them, great hopes. That they should become fine and upstanding citizens of the Universe." She tilted her head to one side. "Someday."

* * *

Chir, the Thal emissary, was spying.

He was physically immobile, sitting in a Council antechamber, waiting for his escort out of the Dome. Even now, it was far from safe from a Thal to wander around out here - even one under an emissary's flag.

But his mind was roaming. It was touching the thoughts of the Kaleds, judging them, reading their moods and their emotions. He had not uncovered any spectacular secrets, but what he felt was - very interesting.

Deep hatred of his own people: that was to be expected. A desire for isolation, for time to heal: normal. But he had yet to touch the mind of someone who was plotting actively against the Thals, and that hardly seemed likely. Even the Council members themselves seemed more than content to just let their former enemies stay on their side of the mountains.

What about revenge, though? Didn't they yearn for it? But there was a thought linked to revenge, that he encountered over and over again. It said that happiness, prosperity and children, those were the best revenge. That endlessly dwelling on revenge was giving life to that which should be dead.

Chir curled his lip, then promptly flattened it out. Revenge was revenge. He was a telepath, he knew all about the darkness of the heart - Thal or Kaled.

Suddenly his mental probing hit a wall. No, not a wall: a noise. A droning, muttering wall of mental static in the distance. What could it be? Some new weapon? A counterwave of mental projections?

The static grew louder, seeming to echo inside Chir's mind. Frantically he closed his mind, performed the mental equivalent of squinting. The noise dwindled to a faint hiss. But he could sense that if he were to start reading the minds of those around him again, the static would deafen him.

"Hello," said a young man who had just stepped into the antechamber. "I am to be your guide."

The static seemed to throb against the telepath's skin. "I'm - under a flag of safe conduct," he managed to say, twitching his shoulder to make the green flag bob above his head. Safe conduct meant that his person was not to be physically threatened, under any circumstances.

The young man raised both eyebrows, surprised. "And I haven't laid a hand on you - now have I?" He stepped forward and held out his hand to grasp; numbly Chir did so. "Until now, that is. My name is Ravon."


	21. The City Within

The Doctor had memories of many strange, tense and frightening conversations with Daleks. But none of them equalled in strangeness the experience of arguing with a Dalek, and with the Daleks' creator, over what amounted to teenage angst.

The three of them were referring to charts and tables that the Dalek was displaying on the main vidscreen (the Dalek had made the metal cables crawl up onto its outside via magnetic manipulation, which caused the Doctor to ponder that disarmed and unarmed had two different meanings). The charts told the story of a race in constant flux; forever striving to both create a uniform template for itself, and yet bring each individual member to the greatest heights that it was capable of. Children were product, were experimental subjects, and were summarily destroyed if they failed. Apparently the batch that had gotten their tentacles onto K-9 was a particularly desirous group, and the Daleks did not want to recycle them for nutrient. Not yet.

The Doctor considered the changes in the Dalek species that were being laid out before him. The changes in Davros. Even the changes in Nyder: there was something crackling and electric about the pallid military figure, something that drew the eye. The Dalek couldn't keep its stalk from following him whenever he moved. When the Commander grew irritated at Security Liaison and snapped at her, "Go arrange for Ferr to be taken from Interrogation to Medical - and take your sisters with you," Esselle ducked her chin and left at almost a run, without the slightest argument. The other Daughters followed her.

The Doctor was certain that there was some connection here that he just hadn't put his finger on. The disobedience of the Daleks, the changes in the Kaleds. There had to be some reason why the Reflectionists were doing whatever they were doing. But before he could mention his unease to Davros, he was interrupted.

"Is this really you?" Leela asked, shoving a black-and-white photo in front of Davros. It had been mixed in with the papers that Esselle had so casually tossed on Davros' desk earlier.

Davros took the photo and looked at it gravely. It showed a Bunker corridor, and Esselle and Nyder standing in it, talking to a third figure - or rather, half a figure. It was the scarred and horribly aged torso of a man, bald, one-armed, and embedded somehow in a small pillar that seemed to be life support and travel machine in one.

"Yes," he said. "That was." His finger traced the strange coloured streaks that radiated around Nyder and Esselle in the photo. "But I do not know what these are."

"Don't you?" asked the Doctor, taking the photo. Fortuitous, he thought. He'd been considering for years how to mention this to Davros, and here was the perfect opportunity.

"It's part of the personality wheel system," said Nyder.

"Actually, to be specific, this is a soul print."

"A what?" Davros was baffled; the Doctor was talking nonsense.

"Didn't the Reflectionists even mention what they added to that body before you transferred your mind into it?"

"No!" Davros clutched at his own chest. "This is mine, all of it! There were no changes, no tampering, all of the Elite reviewed this body! They did not tamper with this mind, it was empty!" The breath rasped too fast in his nostrils; clearly the Doctor had hit a sensitive nerve.

The Doctor gritted his teeth: this was quite a blow he had to deliver, but if he didn't tell Davros now, he might never have the chance. "Empty of mind but not soul, Davros. They bisected Esselle's soul and put half of it into that body, she told me so herself."

"And what did they do with Davros' soul?" snapped Nyder.

"Ah, according to Esselle it had already left the premises, as it were."

"The soul does not exist, and therefore you cannot split one in half or transplant it like an organ. It makes no sense!" said Davros.

"It makes perfect sense to me," said Leela, and all the men stopped and stared at her. Even the Dalek rotated its dome to look at her. She shrugged at their attention and went on. "They cast a spell on the new body, that you should become more like them when you took it. Esselle probably enchanted you beforehand, to make your magic weaker than theirs." Businesslike, Leela started running down the mechanisms of the spell. "Did she chant over you, make you drink her blood, or maybe-"

"Yes," said Davros, paling.

"Yes, what?" asked Nyder.

"Yes, I did take her blood." Davros' knuckles were white on his knees, as he stared darkly at the floor.

"You should not have done that," said Leela, shaking one finger back and forth, but the Doctor shushed her as Davros went on, still talking to the floor.

"It was when I first realised that the Red Hexagon were actually aliens. I wanted to test the loyalty of Esselle. I ordered her to download all of her alien knowledge into my personal computer terminal, and she did. And then," Davros paused, "then I said that since she was my gene-match, her blood was my blood. And had her transfer three units directly into my chair. Straight from her veins into - me."

"Without even testing it for disease?" said Nyder, looking a bit taken aback.

"For a shaman, Davros, you do not know magic very well," Leela said critically.

"Why?" Davros looked up at the Doctor, and touched the tip of his tongue to suddenly dry lips. His eyes were haunted. "Why would they do this to me? What have they done to me?"

"I don't know, Davros-"

"We know," said the Dalek. All of them turned and stared at the machine-mutant, and it stared back.

"The Daleks know," it went on. "They have shown it to us, what they see. What we see. They have plans, for the future, for all futures. We shall be a part of those plans. We cannot be a part of them without knowledge of the soul." The Dalek tilted its stalk skyward.

"Gah!" said Esselle, stepping back into Davros' office by herself, eyes wide. She had obviously heard those last words. "Dalek unit, what are you talking about?"

The Dalek pointed its eye at the Doctor, who tried to look innocent.

Esselle's furious face made it clear that she did not believe his innocence. "Doctor. What have you done?"

"I've only told the truth," the Doctor said.

"You might have waited, don't you think?" she snarled, moving closer to stare at Davros. "This is not the time for this truth."

Davros ignored her; instead his attention was riveted on the Dalek. "What did they do to you, to give you these hallucinations? The belief that there is some immaterial, unmeasurable energy dwelling inside me-"

"It can be measured. It can be analysed," insisted the Dalek.

Davros shook his head as though despairing. Gently he said, "This talk of the soul is superstitious nonsense. Nothing will convince me that such a phantasm exists."

The Dalek made no verbal reply. Instead it backed away from the little group. It seemed to align itself, adjust the set of its conical metal body. There was a strange sudden flash of light, gone before the eye could quite catch what it was or where it came from. And the vidscreen came alight with a new image.

Davros turned his chair to the screen and stared. It was clearly a picture taken from the Dalek's point of view and transmitted via its attachment cables. It showed the figures in the room in stark black and whites, and surrounding and overlaying each of them was a whirl of colour.

Leela's colour was a bright pink-orange blaze, while Nyder was a weaker yellow-purple. That purple was considerably brighter than it had been in the older photograph, and now it showed a flaming red outline that extended some distance outside his body. The red outline flowed upwards into great spirals, like flames. Or horns. Davros and Esselle had almost identical patterns: a blinding vortex of red and blue, centred in their chests and radiating out along their limbs. There were strange blackish-grey marks here and there, slashing across the vortex.

The Doctor was the most dramatic figure of all: his colours deep purple and gold and white, split somehow into a series of lobes or petals.

"That is my spirit," whispered Leela, touching her throat, shoulder and chest in reflexive ritual. "And in you, Doctor."

"What are those black marks on my - soul?" said Davros, making the last word a lie in his mouth.

"Those are scars," said the Dalek. "Scars of severance, from where Security Liaison moved half her soul into your body. She bears the same scars."

The woman in question gave what could only be called a miserable smile. "You should have seen them when I was newly severed. Bleeding energy everywhere. We were fortunate, Davros, that your new body healed and bonded with my - with your new soul so quickly." She looked up at the picture and sighed in satisfaction. "Look how bright you are now!"

"So you admit you did - something - to me!" snarled Davros. He was not at all certain that he was willing to accept this talk of souls, even if the Dalek believed in it. But the Reflectionist woman seemed to corroborate the Doctor's story and was apparently incriminating herself.

"Yes," she said. "We wanted you to live a new life in your new body. Without a soul you would be nothing more than an organic machine, endlessly repeating the patterns of behaviour worn into your nervous system by war and cruelty and death. Instead you have become a new man, and a better man." She stared at Davros, her eyes suddenly piercing.

"A madman," he said ironically.

"You did that. Not us. You have not yet learned to appreciate what we have given you, but when you do, I promise you, it will be worth all the suffering you have endured before that day." Her words shivered with emotion; clearly this was something very important to her.

"You have put this - this thing in me to control me. Tell me. What happens to my soul when you die, Liaison?" asked Davros frostily.

"You might feel a little sad. I hope. That's all. A soul-graft is like a donated organ: the death of the original donor has no affect on the organ itself."

"And what have you done to me, to my soul?" asked Nyder, stepping behind Esselle and touching his truncheon.

She paid no attention to the menace behind her; instead she looked at the screen, at the flaming red outline surrounding Nyder. "You are looking rather stretched." She clicked her tongue as though remembering something. "You went out to capture the followers of the God of War, and when you returned you were - invigorated. Your energies raised to another level."

"You have told the Daleks of this phenomena," said the Dalek, moving closer to Nyder. "It would be interesting to experiment-"

"Keep away from me!" snapped Nyder, and the Dalek backed off.

"And even the Daleks keep their distance. Even they obey you absolutely." Esselle' voice was both curious and fearful. "Something happened to you. What?"

"I was - nothing happened!" Nyder's face suddenly lit with rage, and then seethed down into flat anger.

"Were the followers of the war-god successful, perhaps, in their invocation? Did they call a God to Skaro?"

"There was no calling, there was just. I. I don't know what happened!" snarled Nyder, turning on one heel and giving the room his back. His fists were clenched at his side. "I, He, It…"

"A God entered you," rasped the Dalek. "It has expanded your soul, left its marks on you."

"It could be that," said Esselle dryly. "Although the Commander has never really struck me as the religious type."

"I didn't - I did not ask." Nyder glared over his shoulder at his image on the viewscreen, outlined with red fire. "I don't want anything from - It!"

"You have held a God," insisted the Dalek. "The God is not here, and you are. You have - your soul has defeated the powers of a God!" It moved towards Esselle's side. "This is the power that we seek. The power of integrity, the power of self, the power to overcome the Gods."

"You are - you can't be serious!" The Doctor wasn't sure if he should be laughing or screaming.

"Are you sure this isn't just some defect in your sensory array, or in Nyder? Perhaps it's a medical condition causing this red line," suggested Davros.

The Dalek managed to project withering scorn with its voice. "We have tested our systems, even without your guidance. The Reflectionists have given us their own data on the phenomena. The Commander's condition matches previous data. He will be greatly empowered by this energy congruence."

"That's right," said Esselle with enthusiasm. "You could probably take over the government with little opposition, especially now." Her voice cooled. "Crush Davros' will with your own. Restart the war," she leaned forward, her eyes hot on Nyder's face, "if you want to be the one to go into the dormitories and explain to all those little Kaled boys that they have to go out and fight and die after all."

Nyder flushed with fury as he turned, his eyes going from her to the vidscreen and back. "Never!" he snarled.

Esselle's body slumped for an instant as she sighed in relief, and the Doctor wondered what she would have done if Nyder had said he would, after all, restart the war. Kill him on the spot, maybe?

The vidscreen pictures suddenly wavered and vanished. It was replaced with a rather angry female face: a Reflectionist face, but with red hair. Her gaze slid around the room and then fastened on the Dalek.

"Dalek unit," the Prime said. "You have killed Kaleds. You have killed Daughters. You will make restitution for the value of their lives."

"Understood," it said.

"You will begin your payment now. The Doctor's travel machine has been located. You will aid in uncovering it. You will take full-spectrum readings and energy analyses of the machine both passive and in motion. You will share this data with us."

"We have data regarding bioenergy uplift values to be traded," said the Dalek.

The Prime's eyebrows rose. "Oh?"

"We have had a case of divine possession, Prime, and the host survived." Esselle looked a bit abashed as she indicated Nyder with one hand.

"My, my," said the Prime, turning her head and fixing one eye on Nyder. "We are coming up in the world, Commander. It appears that Esselle's efforts have not been in vain."

"And what efforts are those?" he said demandingly

"Her efforts in healing you, naturally. Before we arrived, not one Kaled in a thousand had enough of a soul to attract the attention of higher-level beings."

Esselle coughed behind one hand. "We should discuss this further, Prime, when Davros is more himself." The man in question was staring down at his own feet, his mind far away: he had been given a lot of very interesting data to collate. "But before that, there is a travel machine to be unearthed. And an execution to attend."

She straightened her collar. "Come along, Doctor. If we hadn't caught Ferr, you might have died in his place. It is fitting that you be a witness to his fate."

* * *

They slipped down one of the narrow tunnels that the Reflectionists had carved into the bedrock surrounding the Bunker; the walls of this passage showed recent heat-distortion, presumably from a Dalek widening it.

"Ferr is completely lost to us," said Esselle, moving down the darkened corridor with her head bowed. "When he was injured during the War, the pain and the shock drove him into his own mind. He built a fantasy world there, a place where he could survive and be king of all he surveyed. A world in which he was the only living person. General Ferr was a tactical genius, and when he could be roused from his fantasy world he could still speak, and give advice: that is the only reason he was not culled. And then years later we created a new body for him."

She turned into a dimly lit room. There was a row of chest-high windows across the far wall, but curtains covered the far side of them. "And when he was finally awakened into reality, in his new body, he decided that he hated it, that he wanted to go back into his fantasy. Rather than lapsing into catatonia, he decided that he would destroy reality. Thus the assassination attempts, thus the destruction of Projectionist and our Leader."

Esselle went to one of the windows, and as though by a signal, the curtain on the other side drew aside. There was a faceless person there, looking back at them.

Esselle flinched. The Doctor stepped closer to the window: the faceless person was Executioner, wearing her red mesh mask. Behind her, Ferr was chained to a metal rack in the centre of the room. His face was frighteningly gleeful, and his hair was matted to his head with what looked like black plastic. Leela picked up K-9 so that he could see through the window as well.

"You can't believe this is the right thing to do," said the Doctor with revulsion. "The man needs treatment!" Leela sniffed; she had no problem with punishing an enemy.

Esselle shook her head. "We have measured his mind. We could bring him back to sanity, true, but he would ever be slipping back into madness. His soul is hopelessly warped. The damage that he has inflicted cannot be repaid by one man's efforts. He came within a hair's-breadth of destroying the Kaleds, perhaps the Daleks and Davros as well. It cannot be tolerated.

"We have several execution methods here, Doctor. We trade for amnesia bombs from the Thals, and detonate them at irregular intervals, exposing criminals to their effects and mind-wiping them. There is also neurosurgical modification. Ferr has attacked Davros, though. If we leave him alive in this time, he will be lynched or exterminated."

"Alive in this time?"

"His sentence is stasis suspension," she said flatly. "We are confining him, frozen in time."

"Leaving the problem of his illness to another generation?" said the Doctor, just as flatly.

"No. Ferr's confinement will be controlled by a machine set to turn itself off only when there are no more sentient life forms on this planet." She glanced at Leela. "He will not breathe, or think, or age in the field. And when it turns itself off, he will be alone forever."

The Doctor swallowed. He pictured a future Skaro, its inhabitants moved to some other worlds or dead, its sun red and feeble in the sky - and Ferr, alive. Alive and alone.

"He wanted to be the only man alive in the world," Esselle said. "So he shall be."

The masked woman turned, and pushed a button on the wall beside her. Slowly, a metal framework rose out of the floor and enclosed Ferr.

Ferr's face gleamed with sweat. "You can't hurt me!"

"We know," said Executioner. "Goodbye, Ferr."

The prisoner's smile faltered, and then froze. He froze: motionless, not breathing, a single drop of sweat hanging in mid-air below his chin. There was an oddly muffled humming from the metal framework, and then the air around Ferr darkened. It was as though he was encased in ice that was slowly being saturated with ink.

The Executioner pushed another button, and metal walls sealed themselves around Ferr's prison.

"Goodbye, Ferr," said Esselle, touching the window with gloved fingertips.

"And his soul?" asked the Doctor lightly.

"Out of the reach of our - out of our reach," she replied, just as lightly.

And then the answer came to the Doctor, and he swore he felt his hearts skip a beat.


	22. Leave-Taking

The Doctor and Leela were outside. It was night time on Skaro, and the endless white plains of fungus were stark and bare under the moonless sky. Esselle had led them out through the tunnels, pointed them in the direction of the TARDIS, and suggested they make haste ("If they have too much time with your machine after they dig it up, the Daleks might be tempted to keep it" was the way she put it, which was quite enough to get the Doctor moving).

"I think I know why the Daleks had us go to their city," said the Doctor, striding over the slightly bouncy fungusscape. "They wanted to see me, personally. To see my soul. So that whenever we met again, in whatever time or place, no matter my appearance, they would know me. If only I'd known…"

"Why wouldn't Davros know that the Daleks could see the soul?" Leela wondered, looking to one side to make sure that K-9 was keeping up.

"He wouldn't ask - and if any of them started talking about seeing coloured lights in people before the Reflectionists came, well, Davros would have had that embryo dissected, I expect." There was a gentle rise ahead of them, and a light beyond it. It reminded them both of the approach to Dal, but this light was not golden, but blue and harsh. They crested the rise and looked down into an inferno.

A long arc of spotlights had been set up, illuminating a mountain under siege. Daleks surrounded the great outswelling of fungus, blowing long jets of black repellent from hoses connected to their arms, burning the more obstinate chunks of fungus to ash. Somewhere under that mountain was an alien artefact that they were passionately interested in uncovering. Great blue spires of fungus toppled like trees, thundering down onto the surface. Ashes blew grey and stark over the white fungusscape, like a snowstorm in reverse, all radiating outwards from a single point. The ashes left long dark smudges, all pointing back to the mountain with a TARDIS at its heart.

The Reflectionists were here as well, working beside the Daleks, tending to carts full of machinery. Scanning equipment probably, analysing the TARDIS. Some of the Kaled scientists worked among them; a burst of flame revealed Gharman as the light winked off the implant in his cheekbone.

On a smaller hill overlooking this process were familiar figures. Davros, riding in his chair. Nyder of course, at Davros' side. But nobody else: no Reflectionists, no Daleks. It was an opportunity the Doctor couldn't afford to miss, and he moved down the hill at once to go talk to the Kaled scientist.

"Keep your distance," ordered Nyder as they approached, and the Doctor froze, involuntarily. Leela and K-9 stopped as well. There was a force and power in Nyder's words that chilled to the bone. The after-effects of his possession, presumably.

"Davros," said the Doctor urgently, loud enough to be heard over the burning of the fungus, and then waited until the scientist looked in his direction. "Ferr, his execution. The Reflectionists put Ferr in a stasis field, and when they did, Esselle said that his soul was out of the reach of their - something. I think the word she was about to say was harvest."

"Harvest?" said Davros, a bit blearily.

"I've been researching the Reflectionists, comparing their paths to my own travels. And when I compare the two, I see the same thing, again and again. Cities, continents, entire planets that are emptied, their peoples dead or vanished. Or sometimes only certain people vanish, and nobody knows where or why. I believe these disappearances are the work of the Reflectionists.

"The Skull Farmers is one of the Reflectionists' nicknames. The totality of sentient life, its growth and progress and achievements: that is their harvest. So they say. That the harvest is a metaphor. But I don't think so, Davros. I believe the harvest is real. I believe that the soul is their harvest."

Leela swallowed, her knuckles white on her knife. K-9 crowded close to her leg.

"So they put a soul into me so that they can - harvest it?" frowned Davros, touching his chest.

"Maybe. To elevate themselves to a higher plane of energy, through the destruction of other souls. They could burn this planet to ash, Davros, so that they can accumulate the energies released and ascend to the next level of sentient consciousness."

"The afterlife?" suggested Nyder.

"Not exactly," said the Doctor.

"Not exactly what?" said a confused looking young man who had just stepped out of the darkness. He was followed by an older man, bearded, who leaned heavily on a cane.

"You are the psych techs?" asked Nyder.

The younger man introduced them both. "This is Psych Tech Scohma, you may have read some of his papers-"

"'The Psychosis of War and its Adherents', yes, I have," said Davros dryly.

"He was scheduled to retire on a medical disability, but has postponed it in order to take your case. And I am Psych Tech Onl; I just graduated with honours. I have dual certification," he said, pointing to an enamel pin on his collar: it showed a mauve oval enclosed by a red hexagon. "I hope you don't object to having such an inexperienced tech assigned to you, Davros."

"Onl underestimates himself," said Scohma, planting his feet. "He has the potential to be the most brilliant psych tech on the planet, and right now he has the most up-to-date knowledge of the field. While I am, without too much flattery, the oldest and most experienced psych tech."

"I look forward to working with both of you on my - condition," said Davros. "I suppose I should introduce you to my people as well. This is Security Commander Nyder; you may find him a bit domineering at the moment. He's recovering from divine possession, you see."

"I see," said Scohma, after a rather fraught pause. His gaze asked for sympathy from the onlookers; clearly Davros was more ill than anyone had thought.

Nyder arched one eyebrow. "And we are currently in the process of uncovering an alien time machine."

Scohma and Onl were both looking very confused now, as they looked at the gathering of Daleks apparently attacking a hill. Onl tentatively asked, "And how long has this time machine been here? Is it a some relic of the war?"

"No, it's mine," said the Doctor. "As I was saying, Davros, it's vitally important-"

"That's the alien," said Nyder, in a disappointed tone. "The Doctor."

The two psych techs looked at the tall, oddly dressed man, and his even odder companions. Their expressions were rather bemused.

"I thought the Doctor was a myth, some sort of battle delusion," objected Onl.

"And I presume this, ah, rather attractively undressed woman is also another alien," said Scohma, regarding Leela with interest. "Tell me, how long have you believed that these people are aliens?"

Both the Doctor and Nyder wore expressions of almost identical amazement for a moment. Then Scohma turned as a strange noise approached. Someone was singing, in the darkness.

There was a rather dizzy-looking blond man being led towards the group. Led was the correct word: he stumbled, looking drunk or distracted. Esselle was holding one of the man's arms, and Ravon the other. And Ravon was singing, the light from the burning fungus flickering in strange highlights across his forehead.

"I've got a someone crazy about me," he sang, and then he and Esselle harmonised, "He's funny that way."

The Doctor glanced at Nyder, who did not so much as twitch as the trio came to a halt.

"Supreme Commander Davros. Security Commander Nyder. Be pleased to make the acquaintance of Thal emissary Chir, travelling under a flag of safe conduct," said Esselle smartly. She and Ravon loosened their grip, and Chir immediately stumbled to his knees.

"I'm sorry, love," Chir gasped.

"You're sorry, what?!" said Nyder, both offended and confused by the other man's words. Chir cringed as he drew himself back to his feet.

"Perhaps I should explain," said Esselle in a smug tone. "When the Daughters were rebuilding Ravon's mind, we sank a lot of flowmetal into his skull - enough that it started acting like an antennae. Ravon in fact broadcasts his thoughts on a telepathic level very loudly - shouting at the top of his mental lungs, as it were. Which is why he was so useful to us during the Peace Accords Renegotiations last year - all he had to do was sit in the back and twiddle his thumbs, and any Thal telepaths who tried peeking under other people's scalps were deafened."

"That's very unethical," said Scohma with a scowl.

"On our part, or on theirs?" Esselle replied. She stood next to Ravon, and with deliberate gestures they fitted themselves together, hip-to-hip. He rested his head and the bared neural implant on that side on top of Esselle's head. They grinned in unison (Ravon's grin was sideways because of the tilt of his head), and the grins were distinctly predatory.

"I," Chir wavered on his feet, "I mus' protest this abuse of the rules of safe conduct."

"You've been allowed to go wherever you want, unmolested. With the appropriate escort," said Ravon. He'd led Chir on a fine trip through the Dome: the man had been so befuddled that he could have been dropped down a well and not noticed a thing until he hit bottom.

"And are you satisfied with what you have seen?" Davros paused for a long breath. "Myself, deranged and crippled?" He could feel his new alertness fading; the world seemed to be moving away from him, down some long dark tunnel, and he couldn't bring himself back - nor did he care to.

"I," Chir paused as well, and swallowed, "I must tell them the truth. That you are very ill. But also, that you are determined to heal your own mind. And that the current Kaled government will continue to rule in your absence."

Nyder sniffed. "I trust that the Thal government will see that even if Davros is incapacitated, the Daleks are not." The Daleks in question swarmed over the landscape around them. "And that they will act reasonably to defend us."

"Not what they were doing a few hours ago," said Chir. "They were acting under Davros' orders, expelling the Reflectionists and killing any Kaleds who got in their way."

"My orders have changed." Davros sagged in his chair. "I have changed."

"We have seen change," said the Dalek emissary unit, coming out of the darkness where it had been eavesdropping. "The theories of the Reflectionists have been proven true. We will follow their path now. We have a destiny to fulfil, and they will help us."

Chir shivered at the impressions he read from the Dalek's mind, even through the static. "Gods help us all!"

"Don't say that," ordered Nyder, and Chir bit his lips. With an irritated toss of his head, the Commander dismissed Chir; he stumbled off into the darkness, presumably back to Thal territory. Then Nyder frowned at Esselle and Ravon, who were still standing heads together, and grinning.

"What are you two smiling like that for?" he snapped.

"We're thinking," Esselle said throatily. "Just thinking." She withdrew her arm from Ravon's waist and went to stand demurely beside and a little behind Nyder; Ravon moved a few steps away to enjoy the unique spectacle of the Daleks demolition team burning their way down to the TARDIS. Scohma and Onl stood, heads together, discussing their initial impressions of their patient.

There was a sudden crackling rumble from the hill before them all, and great segments of it fell aside. The Daleks' blasts reduced immediately in intensity, because they could see the focus of their attentions: the top of what appeared to be a tall blue box. Dalek units started to move in and rip free the last layer of fungus with their sucker-arms. The Reflectionists jumped to alertness, their equipment's lights and readouts blinking faster than ever.

The Doctor had watched all of this, but his attention was still on the Kaled scientist. He had to make him pay attention, had to make him believe. "Davros. You've got to listen to me. You are in danger, your whole world is in danger. If what I think the Reflectionists are planning is true, they could kill every sentient life form on this planet-"

"Nonsense!" objected Esselle. "We've never done such a thing, in all our history!"

"Soloii 3?"

"Weaponised plague, I believe the records say. We do not know first hand; all of us that were there died as well, and their memories died with them."

"The Bew Cluster?"

"It fell into a sun!"

"Or was pushed!"

"Or was pushed?" She straightened herself, the flickering light of the burning fungus showing her frown. "Doctor, if you are going to spread your vicious gossip, kindly spread it elsewhere, away from Davros." A gesture with a weapon that appeared in her hand reinforced this statement, and the Doctor backed off. He looked around, wondering who he could warn. The psych techs? The Elite scientists?

"So. What happens to me now?" Nyder did not turn to Esselle as he spoke, but his words were for her. His hand traced a vague outline in the air in front of him, as though defining the invisible red line that flared around his soul.

She pocketed her weapon, watching the Doctor. "You are in a precarious state, Commander, and there is some danger to you. Imagine what would happen to a man's stomach if you could make the inside four times larger than the outside: either he would be tormented by hunger, or eat too much and bloat his system. Your soul's boundaries have been moved far outside their normal range. For your safety and Davros', there must be counselling and training for you, to let you set your own limits. Absorb the excess energies back into yourself. Your - emotional impulsiveness, shall we say, should fade as the counselling progresses."

"And I presume that the Reflectionists have some alien medical expert ready for me?"

"Well, no. The knowledge base exists, but it is not currently deployed in full; I carry only a fraction of it. The Prime carries it; she will designate one of us as your soul-healer and transfer the knowledge to her."

"You." Nyder reached out and put his hand on the back of Esselle's neck, under her hair. "You will be the one to do it."

She cleared her throat. "You may not want-"

His hand tightened. "You were good enough for Davros' soul, so you will do for me. I choose you. No one else."

"Yes," she said, and shivered.

"So," he said, removing his hand. "Tell me about the Gods."

She turned one side of her head to him, still keeping her gaze on the Doctor. "There are those that we call Gods: beings so advanced that our minds cannot comprehend them. Beings whose powers transcend many limits; who reach through into the world of matter via the soul. In your case, I can only assume that the God of War was working at the limits of His powers. If the God was not separated from Skaro by many light-years, well, you really would have been invulnerable. An invulnerable, mindless, god-ridden puppet for the rest of your days."

"Can a God be destroyed?"

Esselle looked at Nyder, and caught a glimpse of bottomless anger behind his eyes.

"Yes," she said plainly. "It can be nullified, translated into non-compatible energy forms, trapped within certain barriers-"

"I would give a great deal," said Nyder thinly, "to destroy the God, the thing, which…defiled me."

Her full attention was abruptly riveted on the Commander. "Follow us," she whispered, her voice hot. "Follow us, and you shall have your chance."

"And the Daleks?" said the emissary Dalek, softly.

"You shall also be a part of our plans, as you wish it."

"Yes." The Dalek's voice was thick with triumph. "We shall have souls, great souls. We shall join the wars of the Gods, which are greater than those of matter and energy. Above and beyond them we shall do battle. War is not for men. War is for the Gods. We shall be the Gods." Davros looked up at his creation, then down: even this statement was not enough to rouse him.

"No," hissed the Doctor abruptly. He had been rebuffed by Scohma and Onl (they wanted only to discuss how long Davros had been 'employing' the Doctor and Leela to enforce his own delusions), and had wandered back just in time to hear this. "I can't allow that."

"You can't allow that? How do you propose to stop us?" Esselle marched forward, head cocked, teeth bared like an angry animal. "Once Davros has achieved true equilibrium, once the Dalek breeding program creates warriors as great in soul as they are in battle prowess, then there will be no stopping us."

She grabbed the Doctor's scarf and pulled him off-balance, sending him stumbling towards the TARDIS. The Daleks were just peeling the fungus free from its doors. "Time for you to go, Doctor," she snapped. "You've been saying over and over that you want to leave, and now you will. We have work to do, great and glorious work. Your input is not necessary." Leela followed the Doctor, scowling; ready to draw her knife and protect his back if necessary. K-9 wheeled ahead, and stopped with his nose almost touching the TARDIS' doors.

"You can't leave him running around loose," said the Doctor, pointing back at Nyder. "You have stasis suspension, you have to use it on him - or he'll take over the planet. And the Daleks."

Esselle giggled, a ghastly laugh coming from someone who looked angry enough to kill. "Forewarned is forearmed - and even in his current state, Davros' soul is stronger than you think. I should know. Nyder will not be able to subsume Davros, and no lesser target would give him leverage to take over Skaro."

She looked at Nyder with something that was almost fondness in her eyes. "And nobody wants to risk his re-possession. I shall work with him, to rebuild his soul in his own image." She cut her eyes at Ravon. "A not unfamiliar task."

Ravon looked puzzled, scratching absently at his hair where it was still crinkled from his headband.

The Doctor stopped with one hand on the TARDIS doors. He looked back to see them staring at him: the Daleks, the Reflectionists, and the Kaleds. Staring at him silently. Only Davros did not look, his gaze focussed somewhere on the ground - or on infinity.

"Go!" ordered Esselle. "And never come back. I speak for the many and the one when I say: Do not return to Skaro. Do not interfere. Or we shall reap you even as we shall reap our harvest."

Not having any other choice, the Doctor, Leela and K-9 retreated to the TARDIS. With a thundering bellow and wheeze, the blue box dematerialised.

"Where did it go?" said Onl, wide-eyed. He had half-believed that the blue box was a part of Davros' general delusion about aliens. To have it vanish into thin air rather shook him.

"You mean, where and when. That is technology far beyond our current grasp, although not beyond our projections." She turned the nearest Dalek. "Have you gotten your readings?"

"We have," said the Dalek. "The data will be collated and evaluated. Cross-referenced with your data. It will give us invaluable guidance in our own research into time travel."

"All right then. We should go inside, we're done here. Davros. Davros?" She touched his shoulder, but there was no response. He sat there in his chair, staring down at his own feet.

Esselle peeled off her gloves in a swift double motion, and laid her bared hand on top of one of his. "Davros. You're going to be fine. We'll take care of you." There was no sign that he heard her, and she looked up apologetically at the psych techs.

"He's been abusing himself chemically, as well as his other instabilities," she explained, and Onl sucked air between his teeth. "Commander, I think you'll have to drive."

Nyder moved to stand beside Davros' chair, and bent: the controls to move the chair were now embedded in its right-hand side, and with a little lurching Nyder soon had Davros moving back towards the Bunker. Esselle stayed to Davros' left, one hand on his shoulder to keep him from falling. The psych techs and Ravon moved with them, and behind them the Reflectionists and the Daleks packed up their equipment.

The hole left in the fungus by the TARDIS' departure slowly filled itself in. The white square stood out against the ash-covered fungus around it, the only trace remaining of the travellers.

* * *

After the doors were closed and the TARDIS was in motion, the Doctor leaned on the control panel for a long moment. Then he pounded it with his fist, once, in suppressed anger.

"At least the Thals will be warned, if Chir makes it back to them," he said pessimistically. "I'm starting to agree with Gharman, I think. Maybe Skaro is an accursed world."

"Why? Davros is going to the mind healers, and Esselle will keep Nyder under control."

"And what makes you believe that she can do that?" said the Doctor, scowling at his companion.

Leela shrugged. "She is his woman."

The Doctor arched one eyebrow and looked the question, and Leela raised both hers in answer. Then the Doctor snapped his fingers, pointed at K-9 and ordered, "Don't move from this control room until I get back. I'm going for the toolkit."

"Why?" asked Leela, following the Doctor into the TARDIS corridors.

He stopped, and spoke to Leela in a whisper. "I need to repair that hole in his side, and something else. The Daleks may have tampered with his programming. I need to make sure he isn't carrying any Dalek sabotage instructions."

"Or Dalek bombs," pointed out Leela. She helped the Doctor carry the toolkit, and watched anxiously as K-9's casing was patched, and his circuits were probed and tested. After an interminable time, the Doctor sat back on his heels and said, "Nothing."

"Nothing?" said Leela; she was sitting cross-legged on the floor on the other side of K-9, and drinking tea from an elegant pink-and-white china cup. "The Daleks did not harm him?"

"No, they must not have had time - or the proto-Daleks interfered." The Time Lord busied himself in putting K-9's panels back on, and Leela took the opportunity to pet the robot dog on the muzzle.

"I am glad you are all right, K-9," she said sincerely.

"I am fully operational, Mistress."

"Good good, now that you're squared away, I'm famished. Let's see what we have in the pantry that goes with fresh tea, all right? K-9, feel free to run your maintenance subroutines, make sure I've plugged everything back in the right way 'round." The Doctor got up and went into the depths of the TARDIS, followed by Leela.

In the control room, K-9 slowly nodded his head. A tiny sliver of flowmetal deep inside of him straightened and made contact with his circuits, letting a layer of almost invisible wiring painted along the inside of his casing seams become a part of his electronic mind.

In a voice subtly unlike his usual tone, K-9 said, "I obey." And wagged his tail briskly.


	23. Epilogue

The final meeting of the followers of the war-god on Skaro was the greatest ever.

It had the most men in attendance: those who had heard that the avatar of the God had appeared, in the person of Commander Nyder. That news brought out new devotees in droves.

It had a spectacular speech by a Bunker Security man named Kravos, whose impassioned rant about the pleasure, nay the necessity, of submitting to the Goddess of Peace was enough to curl a man's toes. Kravos swore that the Goddess had appeared to him, and was just taking off his clothes to demonstrate the proof of this when the rain of anaesthetic darts came down and knocked them all out. Every last one. Even Lett.

When he woke up, he was sitting in a chair in a plain white room, an infirmary. In the chairs and cots around him lay the other followers, most of them snoring, some of them talking in a bewildered tone to women with kind eyes. One of those women was in front of him, holding a sheet of paper.

"Lett 42018877?" she asked.

He nodded his head; no point in lying. Apparently Nyder had gotten Lett's message about where the followers would be meeting.

"Are you planning to stay in the Dome?" she asked.

"Aren't I under arrest?" he asked, bewildered.

"No." She handed him the paper, and he read that Nyder had filed orders that Lett was acting as detached Security personnel, assigned to capture the followers of the war-god. He didn't know what else to say but - "Thanks! I, I would like to stay here, if I can."

"You're welcome," she said with a smile. "And you are welcome to stay. If you don't mind, we'd like to run a medical scan on you before assigning you quarters. Living out in the Wastelands still has some genetic hazards."

Lett certainly didn't mind, especially since they gave him something hot to drink while he was hooked to a machine to test his blood and tissues. He nearly spit up the last of that drink, however, when he noticed the man beside him. Commander Nyder has slipped into the room, silent as a black ghost, and was sitting beside Lett, not looking at him.

"Commander. I - presume I have you to thank for my not being arrested," said Lett, draining the cup and putting it aside. The other men in the room who noticed Nyder looked away, not wanting to attract his attention.

"Yes," said Nyder flatly.

"Why?"

Nyder looked down at his own feet for a moment, then half-turned his face to look at Lett out of the corner of his eye. "Because I wanted to talk to you. About what it was like. About being part of the Spire Project, even if you, if we, didn't know what the Spire Project was."

Lett had spent several sleepless nights out on the fungus, thinking about just that. So many things that had made no sense suddenly fell into place: the lessons that were repeated over and over, even though he understood them at once; the beatings he'd accumulated from students and teachers for learning too fast; the feeling that he could think, better and faster and more completely than those around him. And the terrible feeling, driven home to him by words and blows, that it was wrong to think, wrong to judge, that he was only to act and obey orders, and that was all.

He'd never believed that, though. He had managed to scrape some self-esteem out from under the ceaseless assaults on his body and mind, some belief in his own self-worth, and hold it close against the world. He had believed that he was alone in feeling this way. But apparently the slight man beside him had felt the same.

"It was a horror," said Lett emptily. "But you know that."

"Yes. I thought, I hoped, that if I talked about it. That if we talked about it, it might be less - painful."

"Did you talk to Davros about the Spire Project?"

Nyder's mouth bent in what was not a smile. "I did. Once." He held out one black-gloved hand, and clenched it into a fist. "With this."

Lett swallowed his sudden stab of shock at the thoughts that gesture invoked, and went on. "What about the Daughters? They say you can talk to them about anything."

Nyder gestured as though shoving the words away. "There are things I can't discuss with anyone who wasn't there."

"I thought they were there - sort of." They could, after all, move memories from one mind to another.

"No. They weren't - none of them have any memories of the Spire Project. There's nobody left. There were only six, and four are dead. Dead before their memories could be saved."

"Yes."

"Yes, what?" asked Nyder.

"Yes, I will. Talk about it." Lett wasn't entirely certain that he would be of any use talking to Nyder, but it was unwise to refuse him.

Nyder drew himself to his feet, and left. He might have muttered "Thank you," but Lett wasn't certain. The ex-cult leader looked at the ceiling, wondering what would happen next. Whatever it was, it was certain to be strange.


End file.
